I can’t believe I have already been in La Ventana, Mexico for a week. The weather has been pretty consistently good on the water. Baja Joes and the rest of the town are booked up solid for the kite board race and competition scheduled for this weekend.
It’s pretty great to be able to keep working on the Mix while travelling, and things are really coming together quickly. We now have most of the book pencilled and the inks and colors are almost half done too. The dashboard seems to be working well, and there have been very few problems of late.
For the writer and the editor both, much of the work in making a comic this way comes at the beginning of the process. Making the script fit into the comic book format can be challenging, and making sure that it works well at this stage is crucial, so that revisions later on are kept to a minimum. It is not possible to simply put a film script together with PANEL1 replacing SCENE1.
Because the comic page is a static image, motion and action, two of the main elements of a dynamic story must be broken down into: before, and after; or during, and after etc. in order to be read effectively. There are many ways to do this, and keeping things interesting usually involves using more than one way to show an action so that it doesn’t feel too static and predictable. The author and editor will collaborate at this stage, making thumbnails and revisions, to see what is working, and what isn’t. Once this part of the job is finished and the script is finished, the art team must then go to work and bring the script to life with dynamic images to illustrate and complement the written word.
This week, as promised Ian Goodwillie, the author of the mix has sent some of his thoughts and impressions about the process of making a comic with Z2H and I would like to share those with you now:
“As someone who has been involved in a variety of creative processes, I
have found work on a comic book in this fashion interesting. Naturally, it
is weird working with people via the Dashboard you haven’t met in person
but I got used to that quickly. The steps are key to the process. From the
vision document to Page X to creating pages of the actual book, it is
about the steps of taking the vision of people new to the project and
matching it up with the vision of the creator.
Page X is the first time I could feel everything coming together. It was
the first page that was fully scripted, inked and colored. I was amazed by
how close it was to what I had been picturing. After that, it has been
interesting to go to the Dashboard and see what new developments have been
put up. It’s actually been quite exciting.
I can’t wait to see how everything looks when it’s done… ”
So there you have it, the straight goods from a writer who has seen his vision come to life page by page over the last month. Next week I promise to have some of the artwork to show on the blog here. Until then, Buenas Noches.
Alex
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