This Is The Place... Infected pg2&3

Page two is difficult to discuss without also taking a look at the opposing page, which was designed to work alongside it.  Looking at them as a pair, I had a few ideas that I thought I would try out, things that in my head made just so much sense!  But what works swimmingly in my head makes other people's head swim, it turns out, and several ideas fell flat.  Let's hope I continue to learn these lessons and failure doesn't become a theme.

The first thought I had involved gutters, or the removal of them, making these four sort of super-panels that contained an emotional or physical bit of acting close up on the face, and a corresponding tall claustrophobic panel of physical acting.  Removing the gutters should mean the removal of time, and conversely, wider gutters would equal additional time.

Makes sense, right?  Sure, but it wasn't intuitive to the reader.  I had to explain it, which means it didn't come off well.  The tighter zooming was also meant to tie them together, but it was only marginally effective.

The second thought I had was having Alida jump off the first page and sort of roll to the bottom of the second, unconscious, with these flashbacks or maybe dream sequences playing out at different timelines in her head.

I've seen Scott Hampton pull it off, I think, though I forget where.  He quite effectively utilized wide gutters to show passing time, but time was linear, so it was intuitive.  In my instance, it was bouncing around in time, so it just doesn't feel natural.  It still functions, the story comes across, so I'm stuck with it unless I want to revisit the pages again, which I do not.

So that's the bad, it's out of the way, I learned some lessons, let's take a look at what worked.

Page two:

What I wanted to accomplish on page two was to demonstrate that even the quiet times on this miniature odyssey, the times when Alida should be at rest, are still fraught with the troubles of the physical struggle going on within.  The next page, when she is unconscious, you get a taste of the past, the origin of the troubles within her mind.  Followed by page four, more of the tough physical journey and actual manifestation of guilt over the events established in the flashbacks, the contrast to this page, the mental struggle within instead of the physical one.

In panel one, I figured I'd just do an aspect shot of the wheels on the train, a little motion blur, and the same sound effects from the last panel of page one, the clack-clack noises a train's wheels make against the seams of the metal tracks.  It is wide, giving the sense of a new environment, an establishing shot, without taking up valuable page space and hitting the reader over the head with what was foreshadowed on the previous page.  It's also cropped so close that it has the tiniest bit of claustrophobia, the beginning of a theme for the infected.

These next four panels, panels two through five, are meant to be a two camera shot, each zooming in as the action progresses, helping the reader along with the empathy that close-ups promote.  The second tier also moves the character upward and to the right, actual forward progress. Panel two, time passes, snow billows about.  Panel three, sickness, vomiting blood. Panel four, some associated pain followed by something grabbing Alida's attention. And finally, panel five in the sequence, Alida is up and at the edge of the boxcar door, gazing out into the cold, aspect shot of blood in the foreground.

Panel six is an inset panel, a close up of Alida's eye grabbing an image of the forest in front of her, making a reflection of a predatory maw complete with gaping incisors, her make up smeared from tears.

The next panel Alida is flying through the air and plopping down into the snow, harder than she intended, a bit out of control.

Page three:

This page was meant to show some flashbacks before picking Alida up off the ground and resuming her journey.  It's what tainted her mind and begat the internal struggle for control and maybe even Alida's soul.

Panels one and two make up the first flashback scene, back at her home, back when the real trouble started.  Luis is already dead, three shots to the chest and blood everywhere.  You get the sense that maybe Luis didn't go down easily and there are bloody footprints leading off to the background, where Alida lurks, wrapped in shadow.  You just missed the action, a moment too late, the hooror will be played out in the mind of the reader(where Hitchcock fans usually believe it's the scariest).  The next panel, the reader is a moment too soon, Alida towers over the helpless baby, gun in hand.  What happens next is implied, but the metaphoric five horses in the mobile hint that the baby isn't long for this world.  The horses, of course, meaning the senses, a little homage to the Q Lazzarus song from Silence of the Lambs, "Goodbye Horses".  Creepy!

The next tier is Alida grabbing a car, killing a random stranger in the process.  Pretty straight forward.  I deliberately kept the faces of the victims small or concealed, saving their empathetic close-ups for the next page.  This is just where the internal horror comes from, it's not the actual burden.

With wide gutters between all three tiers representing wide passages of time(another theme the infected deal with, passing out and waking up sometimes days later, time either severely muddled or completely oblivious to), we arrive at tier three.  Alida wakes up, feels the thing growing inside her, and presses onward.

This one came a long way in terms of storytelling.  My initial thought was some kind of weirdly shaped and fractured panels for the dream sequences, something to reflect her fractured personality or state of mind, but thankfully, my editor pulled in the reins.

The initial art was rough, too, sloppy storytelling.  It's been ages since I looked at these pages, and I'm amazed how much better I've become over such a relatively short span of time!

More to come!