Pencils, always a cautionary tale. After a long while of being stubborn, I started using different colors while putting it together, because it’s just hard to keep it all straight. Too much stuff. This helps. At the same time, it inevitably deeply skews one’s idea of the finished panel, and it’s very difficult to not start adjusting it based on the balance of the colors of pencils. Even the regular pencil is already a false image of the final ink and color picture. It really takes effort to see through it to the finished image. But the red lines look pretty great. And it works so nice with those blue bits. Ooh. How neat.

Then, the lines turn black in the final and the picture doesn’t work. Where did the fun picture go? It’s a mystery.

That’s the catch-22, isn’t it? Gotta be thorough enough, which takes a long time, yet not look at it for so long that you forget the end point is a different thing. Making pencils pretty in that sense is at best a waste of time, and at worst actively counterproductive.

And as interesting-looking as the scaffolding can be, I’m not in the business of making scaffolding, or selling sketchbooks. What’s with this overinvestment in the process anyway? There’s 500 pages of process out there for one page of comics. Who cares? What is being made here? Gotta keep it moving toward the actual thing.

***

But this all doesn’t start there. It starts, as always, with molecules, atoms of the story. Am I drawing, or am I writing these? On this level of elementary particles, it’s unknown.

I don’t think he’d be doing it by hand. There’d be a suit. Should I set up the suit? He’d just have a suit.

The suit is solved the first time I draw it. The suit’s done.

What I don’t know is how long this whole thing even is. Four pages? I can’t send people eight pages again. Four is reasonable. And enough room to not make it a dumb gag. Enough room for some life.

Or two pages? Two works better. Let’s make it two, with an optional third page. Yeah. First panel can also be its own page maybe. That’s the way to go. Decisively leave all options open.

(“Optional” means “either gone in very next draft, or kept around until you realize at the very end that you didn’t need it at all.”)

Obviously that’s where it should end. I have the end in the wrong spot. There goes the optional end splash page.

Will people remember the “two weeks!!” callback from a full year ago? Surely if people remember anything, it’s comics they saw once, on their phone, in an email.

Ok. All written. Solved. Done. No need to change a thing. Let’s get this all into the computer and then just need to draw over these a bit cleaner. Easy. Maybe I’ll explore a few more layouts in Clip Studio, since it’s so quick to move things around. Just to make sure I didn’t miss a glaringly obvious better version.

Do I need need to set up the suit?

No. He’d just have a suit, it’s a comic. Use its strengths. No space for that, and no need to set up a damn thing about it.

How would he keep a suit like that though? Maybe it’d fold? Fits in the cabin somewhere? So it was maybe in the back of the cabin in last year’s comic, in those dark panels?

Ok. Done. Resolved. We’ll see that in the corner of the one panel on the first page. On with actual pencils, finally.

What if, though, it all went completely the other way? I didn’t try that.

Hey, the last panel is back. This one looks fun. The ol’ “it’s only two pages, but it’s actually 50 panels.” Who doesn’t like that. The dense panels release with the blastoff at the end. Pretty good. That would work. That’s not it though. Let’s get back to the original plan: two pages, simple. Now it’s all clear and straightforward, the colors have been decided way ahead of time. Surely nothing surprising will occur during the last 90% of it.

Pencils, inks, color flats, final color next. When you trust the process, it really does all fall into place, like clockwork. I always forget this. It’s very straightforward, when you really think about it.

What if… I made the entire thing blue?

Would that work? Does it completely break the linework I have, by now, finished? It doesn’t. But that’s not the question. The question is: how did I think it would ever work without it? Blue is kind of the reason to make it.

(* significantly abbreviated for reasons of mercy toward you, the reader, who may still have the option to live like a human person.)

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