Posts Tagged ‘Issue 4’
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…With that, all is right once again between Cally and Blake! And yes, Blake is still totally clueless with exactly how much Cally could help. Also, if you’re figuring that this page might be setting up something for Vol.2 and beyond, you’re right– let’s just say that Cally “letting” Blake continue on with his Foucault’s research might have some dire consequences down the road.
This page came out pretty great in my opinion– lots of talk-y back and forth, which is always fun for me to write. Basically the crux of this page is the resolution of Cally and Blake’s schism, which I’m actually pretty stoked about since it’s been carrying on for about 2 issues now– it’s time to get back to some FUN Blake again!
PROCESS!
*One of the cool things about rocking through 4 issues is going back and seeing how much progress DJ has made as an artist– Even just looking at his panel layouts, you can clearly see how much he’s grown as a storyteller.
Check out this page from Issue 1, which is another 6-panel layout, and compare it to this page. One of the biggest things to note is how DJ is varying and overlaying individual panels now– whereas, back in Issue 1, the structure was a little more uniform.
I see it as a level of artistic confidence that he’s gained over the course of the last 3 issues– And that can really only be attained by putting in the time and work between these pages.
* Something else that I really notice going back and looking at Issue one is seeing exactly how comfortable he’s gotten with drawing Cally– I said it back in Issue 2, the moment that I thought DJ “met” Cally– Whereas these days, I really feel like DJ “knows” Cally– Similarly with Blake, Conrad, and the rest of the crew.
Which makes sense, after all, there’s no one on the planet who has spent as much time drawing these characters as Mr. Keawekane.
* Stellar Lisa Moore Colored page once again– The one thing that stood out to me is the highlighting of Blake’s hair in Panel 2.
Lisa has been playing around with a cel-style/animated look on some Spy6teen pages, and I think this is one of the more noticeable moments.
If you compare the lineart to the final colors, you can see how much more depth and highlight Blake’s mane has.
One of Lisa’s greatest strengths as a colorist is that she always motivates her Highlights and Shadows– When Lisa colors a page, she always figures out where the light source is coming from– In the case of the above example: The lights in Blake’s house behind him.
Although we’re in a fairly well-lit scene, you can see that her highlights are always consistent with the primary light.
The end result of which is always a dynamic page!
* Fun Brant lettering layout for this page! I did initially worry a bit about the text in Panel 1– after all, Cally throws out a mouthful in the smallest panel of the page. Luckily, Brant had a brilliant solution for it: A double balloon.
Big word-y pages are always a bit hair-raising for me. On the one hand, I really like those “grace-note” trade offs between character dialogues– the “ums, uh, but…, I mean’s” and so ons. In particular, I tend to script Cally/Blake sequences in this style– because, frankly, that’s how sixteen year olds talk to one another.
The danger, of course, is that you can eat up a lot of page real-estate with start/stop dialogue…but man, Brant ALWAYS figures out a way.
WRAP UP!
There was an interesting write up by Kneon over at Shadowbinders this week– a piece on the voting system at Top Web Comics, that basically explains the mechanics of getting into the Top 10 and exposing the usage of bots and scripts.
It’s a pretty interesting article– and confirmed some suspicions I’ve held for quite some time.
I actually like Top Web Comics– I think it’s a very useful tool for us in terms of new readers finding us, and we’ll continue to use it as such. As I mentioned in the comments section of the write up, I’ve had a few interactions with Richard, TWC’s owner, and I find him to be a pretty swell guy as well.
It is a little unfortunate that some web savvy individuals feel the need to juke their rankings via unfair methods– but hey, what can you do? The way that I see it, you can have a million fake votes to propel you to the number one spot, but if your comic isn’t any good, no one is going to be reading it. So what’s the point? I’d much rather hover in the middle of the list with legitimate and awesome readers who are actually enjoying our work, than have 20,000 robots who DON’T read, voting away.
And at the end of the day, Kneon’s report just made me that much more proud of the fact that we once did this:
And we did it legitimately.
WE BEAT THE ROBOTS, GUYS!!! HUMANS ALWAYS WIN!!
So please, if you have a moment, do drop us a click/vote at Top Web Comics– we really do see a good amount of real/human readers who discover us through the site!
Ok that’s a wrap for this week, gang!! Seeya next week for…
PROM ARRIVAL!!!
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Welcome back 16’ers!
After last week’s opening FLASHFOWARD, we’re hopping back just a scant 3 hours for this story beat– Tons of cool and fun stuff in this page, so let’s hop right into:
PROCESS!
* If I do have a small storytelling regret, it’s that we didn’t get a chance to show off Cally’s dress back in Issue 2. This is basically our “payoff” moment from Page 5 of that ish. I do wish we had the pagecount in that issue to showcase it — just to visually mirror where Cally was at that point in the story to where she is now–
That said, I think the whole point works (and reads as intended)– just sadly, we never got to see the dress until this moment. We sort of broke the “Show it, don’t tell” rule of storytelling– in at least that it took 2 issues to “show”. Eh, that’s the breaks when working in a compressed storytelling format.
* That said, maybe the extra time was worth it, because DJ did a pretty great job designing this dress! Perhaps one day we’ll see a line of Spy6teen inspired clothing designs?!
* Speaking of DJ, he did some pretty interesting stuff on this page– namely in the lower right/last panel, breaking Cally out of the frame, but still consistently grounding her to the staircase.
The orientation is different, but it works because she’s pushing out from where she’d be standing. It’s a neat trick that creates a focal point to the page, and creates a more interesting framing than seeing her back walking down the stairs.
* It’s also interesting to note the little background details DJ put into this page: The plug in Panel 3, and the photo behind Conrad in Panel 5. Little touches to be sure– and in the case of the plug, a mundane detail– but it’s those sorts of things that create the illusion of reality on a comic book page.
* Lisa mentioned in an email that she had a blast with this page– and I think it shows! The Dress color choice was entirely Lisa’s– and I love the little floursh of the matching colored earrings.
One thing that really popped out to me is the slight shimmer you see within Cally’s dress– I’m bad with fabrics, so I can’t tell you what that is, but I know I’ve seen it on tons of prom dresses!
Like with DJ’s power outlet: A tiny little detail, but one that goes a long way to creating a believable world!
If you want to check out an archive of Lisa coloring this week’s page, look no further than right here:
Watch live streaming video from huevillenet at livestream.com
* There was a bit of a back and forth between Editor DJ, Brant, and myself this morning– namely in Balloon Placement for the bottom half of this page…
Originally, I’d scripted that Conrad would be calling Cally from Off-Screen throughout the first half of the page– but after we saw DJ’s lineart, I quickly decided to pull that back– mostly considering that Conrad takes up a decent amount of page space, and it’d look weird to have such a prominent character talking from off-screen and then appear on-page.
That lead to a few revisions, and the page you see is where we landed for the time being…
What’s interesting is that over the emails, I believe Brant “reads” the page as Cally being an independent Panel 4– Whereas (what may be throwing me off) is I read Cally as an Independent Panel 5.
Ultimately, I think the page works either way, so I’m pretty much planning on deferring to Brant on this one. But I did think it was another one of those little examples that showcase how people read comics differently. Obviously, within the “language” of comics, we try to convey a proper message– but no matter what, like reading anything, different people process comic reading uniquely…always good to remember that!
EDIT: Brant worked up an ALT for the page & stacked Cally’s balloon– which interestingly, creates a hybrid Panel 4/6 read…I actually think this looks a bit cool, and kinda lessens (what I felt) Cally coming off as “cold”.
I’ll admit, it has been kinda nice to get back into the weekly editorial email discussions– you guys might be surprised with how many emails there are behind the scenes of Team:16!
OTHER STUFF!!
INK OUTBREAK
Curious: are any of you using Ink Outbreak as a webcomic hub? It’s a pretty interesting little spot, and great for discovering new titles. It almost seem to work in a “Stumbleupon” like format– although I haven’t dug too deeply into the system.
Give it a look here– and of course, if you are a user, please give our Spy6teen entry a thumbs up!
GRAPHICLY
Interesting news out of Graphicly this week– It looks like they’ll be offering a full-service distribution platform for Comic Content creators–
Basically, they’ll handle all the slicing/formatting that your comic would need across Itunes, Kindle, Droid, etc– Although– it all comes at a price, which has rankled a few feathers. Basically it looks like it runs $150 per title. I heard a number of creators scoffed at that number, but I have to admit– if you were to break down that number into the actual man hours it would take to develop your own apps for each of those platforms, it actually seems fairly reasonable.
Obviously, we’ve been using Graphicly as our Digital distribution hub (with their online/mobile platform), so I’m keeping a keen eye on their development.
WRAP UP!
So that’s it for this week! I’m hopeful to have a Blog@16 up with a longer rant about Digital Comics and the Big 2 coming up either this weekend or next week, so keep look out for that!
Finally, I checked in earlier with Team 16 about the overall layout of the site– I figured it’d be best to ask you guys as well, since you guys spend as much time here as we do: Do you feel like the overall layout is getting too banner/Ad heavy?
Does it distract from your reading? I just started to get the feeling that our main page is looking a bit like a NASCAR racer, and thought I’d run it past our loyal readers…
So what say you, should I move some of the front end content to other pages?
Ok gang! That’s it! If you have a moment, please drop us a vote on Top Web Comics:
Seeya guys next week!!
