12th Apr 2021, 4:09 PM
The motive behind the layout and flow of this page and the previous one was to shift the focus off of Paige so that (hopefully) you don't notice that she is gone until the other characters do. I did this by tightly cropping around the characters, and using a lot of "singles" (panels containing a single character), before ending with the wide shot reveal in the final panel here. I like the big empty space in that panel, with our characters clustered in the lower right corner, taking up about 1/8th of the composition. Hopefully it really gives the sense that Paige has seemingly vanished into thin air. I experimented with adding a wisp of fog on the ground, but it was a little distracting and seemed to have come out of nowhere. So it's not a foggy night in Kurtzberg.
Eagle-eyed readers may noticed that I'm kind of flip-flopping the screen direction all over the place on this page. I explained the concept of The 180 Rule, and how it relates to comics, in a previous Creator Comment. Since I had set up a pretty definite left/right opposing relationship on the previous page, I really wanted to stick to it here. Originally, I thumbnailed out Steamroller Man on the left, and Night Knight and Sleep Tyke on the right. When I was working out where the dialogue balloons would go, I realized Night Knight's big speech just wasn't going to work, if he was positioned on the right side of the panel. No big deal to flop them, I just had to draw another background of the building across the street, rather than the already established brick wall.
Next time... we find out what happened to Paige!
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