The Protagonist Brain(partIII)

Any expression of idea is wide open for interpretation, and in a collaboration, interpretation is inevitable. In your own private inner mindscape, the protagonist is always your own brain, the antagonist is every communication obstacle between your idea and it's understanding by the reader.

When considering your approach to storytelling, it's far more complicated than merely showing a procession of progressive images that illustrate a story.  Film is a medium best suited for showing action, a novel is best suited for describing thought, but sequential art contains limited text and limited imagery, leaving it somewhere in between.  Does that make it better or worse than the other two mediums that bookend storytelling?  That's a tough question that is largely determined through execution.

It's the artists job to sort out what the book is going to both show and tell you.  Compound that complexity when you start throwing color into the equation.  It's up to you to make the collaboration of text and images mutually beneficial, leaving them leaning on each other, supported by one another.  In that same way, the art and color should serve to improve and inform it's counterpart.

So here I am, I have these grand ideas of how I see the book in my head. I hammered out the approach for one aspect of the story, the scenes involving the "infected". The first samples I get back look great, some minor tweaks need to be made to fine tune my art style with the colorist's sensibilities.  Maybe that was just beginner's luck.

Now the second approach is tested, the parts of the stories told through bare line work, no moody ink washes, just line and color. I was looking for a similar flatter look for the foreground characters, and a more painterly or textured background to make them pop. I deliberately left some very sparse line work on the page, and eagerly awaited the first samples to return. And when they did, the departure from expectation to reality really snapped into focus.

On the right, it's one of my first attempts trying to convey my vision to the colorist, and as you can plainly see by way of revisions, I pretty well butchered it.  Back and forth, again and again, because I wasn't clearly communicating my ideas either visually or verbally.  I wasted a lot of time that you normally don't have to squander, so I needed to figure something out, a better way to communicate and fast!

I am now including some very basic lighting guides, no longer leaving it entirely to the colorist to divine where the light is coming from.  I'm also adding a lot more texture to the backgrounds, which is sometimes a major chore, but it's beginning to come across.

This is an ongoing work in progress, my intention is to document the process, my thoughts and views on the work along the way.  I'm quite sure there are many lessons to still be learned, but I've come a long way in figuring out a way over or around many of the larger hurdles involved in making a comic, from start to finish.  This is a collaboration, open to interpretation, from the people I work with down to the ones who will finally be reading it.   I hope you find an angle you find interesting within this blog, as a fellow creator, as a fan/reader of comics, or just someone looking to rubberneck at the train wrecks as they happen!