#fassina

Because THIS sequence was the first image that occurred to me, it was clear to me that it needed to be a visual medium versus a written piece. And because it's a short, punchy little joke, it made more sense to put it into a strip format with minimal changes panel to panel, rather than a series of comic pages with like, design integrity. And once I set it up in this medium, it opened up a few more opportunities particular to being a strip comic, like the gif panel of Kressa, and the 'after credits' joke.

One of the things you have to learn to think about when you're doing any sort of sequential art is minimizing effort and detail to achieve your aims; anything you include on the page or in the panel is done with intention and purpose. This is kind of integral to the art form in a way that you can't gloss over, simply because the exhaustion of trying to render everything perfectly in every single panel will destroy you before you can finish a single god damn thing.

For another example, there is an unfinished comic I never got very far on for Ballard and Gortash, kind of going through a pre-tadpole encounter where Gortash is working on a project and cannot slept, and Ballard literally poisons him to make him. I decided to do it as proper comic pages, rather than a strip, because I was trying to evoke this intimacy and weirdness between them, and underline how their closest and most stable interactions are founded on utterly bizarre maladaptions--but that was not what I had conceptualized the piece as. The entire bit it was building up to was, very simply, another post credits gag; "Well, how do you deal with it when you can't sleep?" and a jump cut to Sceleritas Fel hitting Ballard, complete with sleep cap and eye mask, over the head with a bat. The effort and detail in the lead up crashed and burned before I got to the pay off, because I didn't think well enough about what I was trying to accomplish and how best to get there. I still have those page layouts, but there were a half dozen factors that meant I never got through inking, let alone lettering and/or deciding whether to color it at all.

If I had been conceptualizing the interaction between Ballard and Gortash as my goal from the start, I probably would have opted to write it as a fic rather than try for a comic, even page style. The big differences between long form illustrating it and writing it out, because ostensibly those are both good approaches for a more serious/non-humorous piece, is that if you're writing it you get to play with internal narration. In a comic, you are limited to visual information and dialogue. Dialogue can punch! But people tend to read through a comic much faster than dialogue on a page, and, likewise, the visual information can be easy to miss. With internal narration, I could have brought a few key things into focus: Gortash's distraction, being so focused on his project, making it clear this project was the sort of long-term dream he could fiddle with for years and never come to fruition; his confusion and sleep deprivation making it easier for Ballard to 'hunt' him, sneaking in through the window and knicking him with the poisoned dagger, the self-censure over allowing it to happen, the shame and guilt of not performing his role to perfection; the genuine softness and disarmament as the poison started to work, allowing Gortash to acknowledge to himself his fondness for his business partner, allowing for it to slip out in a less-than-controlled gesture.

Both writing and illustration have ways to control a reader's attention and the speed at which they go through it; long versus short sentences, the size of panels and the dynamic versus static quality of their borders, italics and bold or specialty fonts/weighted lines, etc. If you think about adapting one to the other, in either direction, you can kind of grasp what the limitations of each are; visuals can be communicated much more smoothly and effortlessly in a comic, and a narrative can be twisted or skewed in text without the reader noticing so easily. I would like to do more exercises trying to take a scene back and forth, honestly!

In some ways, deciding to do a static illustration is a much simpler decision: do I have anything more to say than [LOOK AT THIS PRETTY THING]. This is a simplification! But not entirely. If I'm putting in the effort for a full illustration than the goal is for the viewer to luxuriate in the details, the colors, the textures. I'm pretty much always thinking about, like, specifically the splash illustrations at the end of scanlated manga chapters, which I'm sure are pretty standard across genres but which I loved the most in Kuroshitsuji, XXXHolic, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Death Note. If it's an illustration that's companion to a piece of writing, there are details and hidden tidbits that tie back into it or might come up later--or, I'm making a deliberate comparison or reference to another piece!

For example: Leda and the Swan, for the One for a Death, Two for a Pair illo. Smile. Introducing Themes and Concepts, etc.

It's great to have OCs for other media to work with, because when I have an idea for Ballard or Arenthis or whoever else, I can sit with it and decide what the best way to express that idea is going to be. I have a whole list of Arenthis projects that may or may not be gotten to, organized in order of foundational importance (to carry off a meaningful reveal you have to hint at it first!) and then labelled according to what best gets across the point. There's several fics, a set of panel-style illustrations, and a comic!

But when I've already decided that a project is going to be all written--Said the Tiger to the King, for instance--I have to make sure all of the ideas I can have are going to be able to be gotten across through writing, which means some of them have to be thrown out. Because I can visually design my characters, and have already done so, it's a huge struggle to determine how much description is necessary to be written. But on the other hand there are cool things I can do with a multiple POV narrative that I could never pull off in a visual medium, like Melisande's shifting pronouns.

I'm trying to be more deliberate with my plotting and planning, so something I am trying out with my outline for Said the Tiger is a list of concepts per act and per chapter, rather than an outline that's effectively just an ordered list of scenes; what is the purpose of this act? What do we need to know about these characters? What notes do I need to hit to underline the stakes for this conflict? What am I not saying, what do I want the reader to feel? Ideally, the first thing I do with a written project is set those up. Like I said before about sequential art needing to frontload decisions about what you're expressing and focusing on, writing also requires you to do that, but it pretends like it doesn't. Theoretically you can seat of your pants it the whole way through--but it's going to take a lot of time and pain to notice when you've prioritized incorrectly, and to go back and repair the mistakes. In my experience a lot of writing advice and instruction kind of misses talking about intention, and it's a tough lesson to learn.