THE AZURE PANTRY - progress; sketching; feels

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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.

THE AZURE PANTRY - 1: thumbnails pps. 1-10 + 1st sketches

Decent progress today.  Finalized thumbnails for pages 1-10 of The Azure Pantry.

This all looks perfectly inscrutable to you, I'm sure.  Which is fine.

After all, these aren't the comix themselves.  Those will arrive before your eyes eventually.

Bottom row:  my very 1st two sketches for the project, for panels 1&2 of page 7.