Splitting Pages and Adding Panels

Here's a look at how Poe and I interact when it comes to editing the Errant Story books for print.

See, the original pages have to be relettered because the original lettering is pixel data that's full of errors and it can't be printed worth a damn, but a lot of the pages for the original webcomic had WAY too much dialogue on them. In Errant Story, the text is better than the art for developing the stories and characters,* and in a lot of places it really sings, so while I'll whittle at it a little, I'm reluctant to do too much in case it ruins the voice of the books... and that means that something else has to give. In this case, that something is the page count... I'm splitting pages to give the art and text both room to breathe.

Once I've gone through the transcripts of the pages and made corrections and decided where to split them, I do the new page layouts and the lettering. Usually that means borrowing and rearranging existing panels, but there's only so many existing panels, and that leaves blank spaces where new art should go. Sometimes I can cheat a little with the existing art and make minor corrections or extensions of it myself to save Poe some work, but sometimes there's just no way around it. I'm trying to require as little in the way of new art as I can, but there's only so much you can do when you have to split pages into two or even three of themselves just to get all the text in, and on top of that maintain a good flow of the dialogue across the page breaks.

Unfortunately, as we've been working, Poe has been really struggling to match the style and emotional tone of the original pages when he adds the new art. It's hard for an artist to go back in time stylistically. Up until now, he's been seeing pages that look like the one at the left, and then drawing the new art on a separate page and adding it in. That's not working very well, so I thought it might help him to take his methods back in time a little and put the new art in context as he works. So now instead of working on a blank piece of bristol, he gets a printout of the revised page that looks like the image on the right. The things he doesn't need to alter are solid black, just like when he'd ink the pages originally, but the things he does need to work on are in red (he pencils with a red pen and then inks over it).

We're actually using a similar technique to rework Chapter 10 (which in the print edition will actually be Chapters 13 & 14). For those pages Poe is scanning all of his original art, blowing it up, and printing it as red or blue lines. Then we're inking overtop of the original art, treating it as pencils. I'm doing a lot of the architectural inking for those, while he's doing the more expressive inking on characters and such. Once they're done, the result should be a new, elf-specific flashback art style, which should help integrate Sarine's flashbacks from the start of the comic. It will also give me much more flexible panels to work with when I do the page layouts, and that's a VERY important thing, because out of all thousand-some pages in Errant Story, those particular pages have been hacked to bits trying to cut down the redundant text and make room for the lettering while maintaining Sarine's voice throughout.

Oh, and the original page this is taken from can still be found here: [link]

* The art is no slouch, it's just that of the two, I'd rather add art than sacrifice text.