Monday, March 10, 2008

"Echoes" page three

5 comments:

  1. I love your gutter treatments, but I really wish you'd do more backgrounds. Walt Simonson once did a crit of my very early work and he totally kicked my ass about lazy backgrounds and I've tried to work on that ever since.

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  2. Although I agree with the "lazy background" theory...I may have to actually disagree with the esteemed Mr. Piekos on this page here. I think that because this page is dialog heavy and there's a lot going on in the gutters that anything more would make the page cluttered.

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  3. I'll take that criticism to heart, Nate.

    I did this comic a little over a year ago but it's never seen the light of day until right now, right here. Like everything I do, I always look back and cringe a little. You always see areas where you could have done it much, much better.

    Cyd's script was pretty dense and I wanted to keep the comic as short as possible so I do think I cramped things up a bit. Cyd probably agrees, the bastard. Heh.

    I have a tendency to focus in on the characters' expressions, body language, etc, and tend to give you one or two background shots and leave the rest to the ole imagination.

    It's an interesting criticism, though. I mean, this type of comic is skirting the line between being mostly about the visuals and being equally visual/story driven. With Pan-Gea I don't crank up the tits-n-ass factor too much. I actually focus far more on the world - it's mythology, characters, and history. And even more than that I like to focus on the subtext of each story. The drives of the characters themselves and how they reflect the pathos of this broken world.

    But if I wanted to make this all about the visual money shots then I'd need to focus a hell of a lot more on details, backgrounds, more precision in the basic drawings.

    Food for thought.

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  4. I like to do quite detailed backgrounds myself and that's really one of my favorite bits -- however doing a humor strip often less is more.

    For me a big part of what makes James' style so cool is his minimalism. Still, I do love his backgrounds/scenic shots. I was thinking it is working quite effectively to have the close in shots of the characters, between the long pillars at the side that establish the setting - if you were on that rock you would be quite close in to whoever you were with.

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  5. There is a dreamtime element to the setting here. Trillium Spire is very very tall and thin...but at the summit you aren't really on top of a rock. It's a sacred place. Time and space are sort of beside the point.

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