Wonderful! My Time in the hot spot.
Well, to keep this on comics, lets go back to high school Chan [age 16-17, years 98-99] on her 10th issue of her Shoujo-magical girl-manga with anthropomorphic characters. It was called, "Brandy the Star Child."
Wow, did I just type that? Think THE GOD MACHINE meets Sailor Moon, with no spookiness, and more weird adult elements. [homosexuality, forbidden love, Incest, disembowelment, rape, fun stuff!]
Did I write that too?
Anyways, young Chan thought she was pretty amazing. From her 75 plus character line up, clever depressing story that pushed the magical girl nonsense to a different level altogether, great character interactions, and the best art she had ever done in her life!
Well, for what I was doing at that time, it was fairly different in terms of genre. If only in scope of the story I wanted to tell.
I worked on this series through 7th grade til 11th grade. I enjoyed it, but I grew tired of manga.
Anyways let's take a gander at two of these "impressive-life altering" comic pages, shall we?
Now there is a lot of personality to these pages, and I'm almost getting down composition.
"Almost." Course when i drew these, I never did a thumbnail, nor did I have a script. I just did it on the "fly."
Which is similar to the process in which I write my scripts now, only with no layout nor fully realized characters.
Of course there was much to learn in terms of anatomy, and other artistic conventions. But ugh, those panels on the left page are so awful! [let alone my background!] The right page has an issue with attracting the reader left to right to see the character standing- you automatically want to go downwards with your eye and read it in a vertical column.
Regardless if this is a teenager's work, I still have a fondness, and almost seems unfair to tear apart baby Chan's dreams of being a comic/manga artist. ;D
So let's take one of my favorite current comic pages from The God Machine, shall we?
This one reads well, left to right without much issue, and still has a lot of character coming through through movement and flow.
I've developed a consistent style, and have added elements that are much a part of the comic as the actual panel art.
We still have characters coming out of panels, and characters wigging out in a cartoonist manner, but it's far more controlled.
Composition is now working as a whole page. Also the anatomy is stylized, but works well for our characters.
It's worth noting everything I was striving to achieve with Brandy, is coming through in The God Machine's pages.
It certainly had a great deal of the fundamentals that gave way to a more refined stylistic look.
...I'm just glad I got out of that "hey, use actual Japanese in your book! That means you're hard-core!" and my manga stage of course... even if it's still evident to this day. ;D
-Chan
Thu Oct 22, 2009 6:45 pm 
