chance chance chance chance chance!

I’ve gotten the rough draft letters for about the first half of Chance. It is SO COOL to see the actual words with the images. I mean, I know what they all say and what’s going on in them, but there’s something radically different about actually having the words on the page. Wow.

I keep looking at this and thinking ‘there is NO WAY Image can turn this down.’

Which is not true.

But *man*! *Man*!

Don’t think we’re going to make the Oct. 1 submission deadline I’d set, but we’ll make Oct. 15 easily. Holy cow. The first leg of this project is honest-to-God starting to wrap up. This has been so incredibly cool to do. I *luff* it.

And since I’m posting about Chance anyway, I think I’ll do the first part of my comics creation essay now, too, ’cause I realized the whole thing was going to get ridiculously long to post in one blort.

(ETA: I’ve flocked this entry to humor , who will be using it on EMG-Zine at some point in the future. Hopefully she’ll tell me when.)

So here’s the thing.

Creating a comic book is not like creating a novel.

Now, probably this is not going to come as a stunning revelation to anybody, but as I’ve gotten further and further into this project, and begun to get more and more of a feel for what a wonderfully collaborative process it is, I’ve started to really admire the mindset and the excitement of working on something that’s so utterly different from the primary fiction form I’ve been doing for the last five years.

First, how I got started on this ride, if you don’t know and are curious.

I learned how to write comic scripts from a combination of screenwriting classes and then Nat Gertler’s PANEL ONE, and more or less chose the Neil Gaiman approach: write a highly detailed script, full of panel layout suggestions and anything I can think of, followed by, “This is basically just all an idea. If you think of something better, do that instead,” which has worked extremely well for me so far. One of the things I’ve gotten a real kick from is seeing how different artists have rendered my words into art:

The thing I like is how they’re all very distinct and separate stylistically and even in page layout, but at the same time it’s easy to see how they all came from the same text.

—

When Ardian sent me his audition page, he said he wanted to show me something a little better than a rough (this, in and of itself, was a good sign. If the artist doing the audition is willing to go above and beyond the call of duty, you’re in a good position.) What he sent me was by far the most completely rendered page anybody’d auditioned with, and he did one thing that was absolutely critical, to my mind: he gave me the Panel 2 money shot:

I wanted that Very, Very Sexy shot in that second frame, and not all the artists gave it to me (oddly, both the women did). Ardian nailed it. Between that and the *style*, which was OMG *exactly* what I wanted my comic book to look like, I had no doubts I was going with him as the artist.

So the next thing we (he) did was roughs for the whole book. I’ll be showcasing the first 5 pages of everything for all these stages.

By this point, I believe the only appropriate phrase for my reaction is “giggling like an idiot”. The funny thing is that the page layouts have changed quite significantly in some cases from roughs to final inks, and so looking at the roughs now is really surprising to me: Hey! That’s not how that looks! I’ve been offering up critiques–not many of them–and commentary on the roughs, pointing out things I especially like or that I thought needed work, though I’ve mostly discovered that the difficult stage is between the roughs and the final pencils: there ended up being 3 or four frames that I’d liked the angle of better in the roughs, or, on one page, where the pose was fantastic but there was just something anatomically wrong.

Obvious changes from roughs to pencils: On the first page, I changed a panel between the rough stage and the final pencils stage.

Page two, Ardian brought the focus in closer to Chance: whoom! Also, by this time we’d decided on her mask, so that’s changed.

Page three, the frames have moved around quite a lot, in fact (and yet nothing like they have in the final inks!) and Ardian’s given the Hero a Robin-Hood costume (I love it :)).

Final pencils (Sorry for the funky thumbnails, too lazy to make my own):
1. 2. 3.

Page four: again, we’re looking at an almost total re-draw. It’s mostly Ardian, not me, making these decisions, as he’s become more familiar with the story and has decided what’ll be the most effective story-telling technique. Also on page four, the nameplate on Our Heroine’s desk needed changing–her real name is Frankie.

Page five: I actually wrote the major panel there as a profile; somebody on Ardian’s deviantart gallery pointed out that the page as it was in the final pencils had two almost identical panels. I wouldn’t have noticed that, but it was a good call, and Ardian changed it in the final inks. Another thing I asked for a change on there was the off-set of the first two panels: there’s a small motion going on in there, and I wanted a visible chunk in the panel shape to help bring that to light. Ended up changing the focus on the four stacked panels in order to clarify locations–little stuff that made the whole thing work better.
4. 5.

Next up: final inks, rough draft letters, and hopefully some colors. :)