Offline.
Funeral for a Friend
Also the title of possibly the best Superman trade-paperback out there.
I’m glad/sad this week is over. I did what I came to do, but it feels uneven to me. I’ll have these weeks where there’s mostly silence, but one or two strips will just talk your ear off. I hope the imbalance doesn’t take away from it. Things begin to move quickly next week, there’s not much time left for mourning.
I appreciate (the strip and that) you are a tortured artist and all that (hehehe) but I still don’t understand your obsession with text volume. Sure, that’s one of the Rules with “big 2” comics, mostly because of the fixed format and the white-bubbles-with constant-size-text constraints. This here strip is no Avengers, Green Lantern or anything. It’s not quadri, it barely feels inked, you’ve moved way beyond these but still you feel bad for a few words more (or, as the case may be, less).
Real life is not a 25-words-a-page thing. Sometimes you shut up for hours, sometimes there’s no stopping you, and that’s fine. Let your characters be a bit chatty if that’s what they would do. Let them shut the fuck up and frown if that’s what they would do (but you’d rather have the art speak for itself in that case. In this strip I think you nailed it between panels 2 and 3, they’re almost a movie in themselves).
I’ve always envisioned writing as a roleplaying game, not as a baloon-vs-art statistics calculation. Then again I’ve never achieved much in that field; but I’m good at reading ;D
A good occasion to tell you I like what you do with out-of-panel text an “font” size changes. Not a big fan of the reversed text trick but hey, at least you tried and it’s still better than the option, I agree.
*translated from Stan Leeian
Shit, brackets don’t work in comments.
The last paragraph was supposed to read “the angled bracket open ‘bracketed text’ * angled bracket close option, I agree”.
Keep the good work up!
Haha, thanks! I’m relieved that my art neuroses are in fact in my head. I don’t have enough confidence in my art to hold people’s attention, so I’d rather enslave their minds with a wall of text that they’re forced to wade through. But, that’s also how I read comics, casual glance at the art, spend time reading the text. So I just kind of expect everyone else to do the same.