The Killer Station of Deadly Doom – page 48
(Historical Notes: Some context is necessary before I get to the main bit. I don’t normally write out the whole plots for comic arcs in advance, unless I know it’s going to be REALLY complicated. Even then, I don’t script things out page by page before drawing. At most, I’ll pound out a rough overview of the whole story, just to straighten out the key details, and then I start drawing rough drafts. Now, when I say “rough drafts,” what that usually means is dividing a single sheet of paper into four sections, and doodling a sketchy little thumbnail of a page into each of them. Aside from getting the basic dialog worked out and marking the character’s placement on each page, the main point of this is to be able to see multiple pages right next to each other and get a feel for the pacing of the broader story. Sometimes I realize some pages can be combined, other times one page needs to be broken into several, and sometimes I realize a certain plot point has gotten lost in the shuffle and needs to be brought back up. Then, once those big picture details are worked out, I can focus on fleshing out the individual pages. The problem is, sometimes I get so far behind on comic work that I run out of rough drafts and have to jump straight into writing each page from scratch, and that’s when mistakes start to happen. I can’t be positive, but I THINK The Killer Station of Deadly Doom ran out of rough drafts at just around this point, and that’s why Vance up and disappears. If I WAS flying by the seat of my pants and just trying to get all the exposition out intact one page at a time, it’d explain why I never noticed how long we’d gone without seeing one of our main antagonists.)
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