Breaking down a comic book page
From script to panel
Editor’s Note: It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s New Comic Book Day and another edition of Amazing Journey!
The Amazing Journey column will touch on a comics-related topic, such as writing the first issue of a series, what it’s like to run a comic book store, working with artists, and how writing comics is different from writing prose.
Amazing Journey back issues
True believers unite (#1) | My comics origin story (#2) | Comic event series (#3) | The comics of Kickstarter (#4) | Single issues or trades? (#5) | From prose to comics (#6) | Adapting a celebrated fantasy series into a comic (#7) | Charting a career in comics (#8) | Comic book spoilers (#9) | Lessons from Kieron Gillen’s masterclass (#10) | Comics marketing 101 (#11) Designing memorable characters (#12) | The importance of comic book shops (#13) | Finding community at NYCC (#14) | Writing first issues (#15)
Team Blood of Atlantis is currently working hard behind-the-scenes to bring you an awesome first issue. As I wrote the script months ago, much of my work now is project management: communicating between the various team members, making the pages are moving along the creative assembly line, creating the Kickstarter campaign page, finalizing the various covers, and creating awareness in advance of the launch (which will be the subject of a future column).
With our six-page preview released last week to subscribers (check your inbox, or drop a comment if you can’t find it), today I thought it would be fun to do a side-by-side comparison of each panel of page 1, from script to finished product.
Note: to due to the length of this email, your email client will likely truncate it. Just click the title above and you’ll be able to read the entire thing.
Off to a good start! Who needs dialogue in your comic?
Panel 1:
Another no-dialogue panel. We’ll just build the progression slowwwwwly until the next panel.
Panel 2:
Holy Alan Moore! Although not quite. This description was intended to give some additional context for our main character. And we finally have a caption!
Stepping back and reading over these 3 panels together after receiving them from Toben, I realized that it was a pretty boring start with the two wordless panels:
It would be great to identify where the heck we are, but I didn’t want to break up Beatrice’s narration in an unnatural way. Luckily, I came up with a good solution that was deftly implemented by Toben:
That’s better! Now we know where we are and we have some more scene setting with the location and time established in a snarky way.
Let’s move to the set of next panels:
Astute readers will notice that the Quest Board screen that appears above is also from Fran and my earlier 5-page mini-comic from the Guild of Magic Kickstarter, which you can read here.
Finishing off page 1 with a nice page turn!
As I mentioned above, you can read the first six pages of Blood of Atlantis by checking out the preview.
I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look. Let me know in the comments what kind of posts you would like to see next!
Interesting to read!