THE AZURE PANTRY - all thumbs (pps. 1-12)

 

Things are coming along nicely.

It's a little stunning to me how the information parcels out, on a page-to-page & panel-to-panel basis:  there's no 1 = 1 where a written page equals a drawn page, not really.

Like ch.1: which (although caption box heavy) equals maybe a quarter of a page in type, takes six full-bleed pages.  That was a difficult choice on my part.  I resisted it for a while, accustomed as I am to the constraints of page count.  But this is My Book, right?  So why not have the whole thing breathe and be about atmosphere.  I relaxed and indulged the impulse to make the opening chapter a series of full-page splashes.  And once I did, it felt ideal.  It made sense; it opened up the format for me as though I were unfolding an origami, permitting me to understand where the folds went & how discrete points related to one another.

You get to ch.2, and look at that page on the left: there's one caption box, one spoken line of dialogue, and that's it for two & a half pages.  Everything is just shot wild, a nice silent sequence of Emerson walking through a dark apartment.  Then there's a tumbling barrage of dialogue captions representing SMS texts, which goes for basically a single page, spread all the way across the middle bleed of 9-10.  So one full typed page of script = 3 pages of comix.

There's one more page of dialogue to ch. 2, and that goes for 11-12 & 13.  So two pages full script = 6 pages total.  But it's all extremely elastic, and I suspect the expansion & contraction will only get wilder & weirder as the story progresses.

This implementation of the 6 panel grid really pleases me.  It allows for total use of each two-page spread and makes everything, well, Whole.  I don't feel like the pages are forcibly separated from one another by the straight razor of the industrial printing process.  This implementation of the 6-panel grid is a 12-panel grid, really: it lets me think about each set of two pages as one essential unit.

That's not how I was taught to think by The Industry, with all the arbitrary changes in story sequence advertising & magazine formatting choose to impose.  Makes me feel like I'm in control of my own book, for a change.  And that's a fuckin' excellent feeling.