On the Verge – The Arrow of Time – Page 290-291

So today’s new spread is really the end of the series of pages that began several posts ago. I had a lot of fun drawing all the weird little parts of the machine and naming them all, so enjoy the page and I’ll explain after:

Click the image for a larger view.

Ok, so I’ve kept pretty mum about just what is happening here but I figured that since this set of pages is wrapping up, it’s about time to share my thoughts.

I guess a good place to start would be in explaining just where Hannah is (or isn’t, depending on your view point). If you haven’t already guessed it, Hannah is essentially “outside of the timestream” – something I eluded to way back in Chapter 7 when Hannah was explaining the Professor’s research. Now just what that means is open to debate. My thought was that it definitely should be open to interpretation and definitely not “real”.

Another aspect of this series of pages was trying to get Hannah to start to figure out just what is going on. If you remember back to the start of this chapter, Hannah was basically asking “where am I?” and she’s spent the rest of the chapter really trying to figure it out. She’s lost and basically has no clue. Part of the role of the talking frog was really to help Hannah sift through the details that she has and what she can remember and start to piece everything together – or in the case of this spread, take things apart.

Overall, the idea here has been to really make Hannah ask questions and use the art to start breaking things down. Again, the art is supposed to amplify the overall ideas in the story while the copy is basically Hannah and the frog talking things through. This started subtly by having the frog take over Hannah’s head:

Is the frog even real or is it all just in Hannah’s head? I’ll leave that up to you to decide…

Before starting to break her up:

And then starting to distort things and having Hannah full of mechanical parts:

Note that the frog is both in the centre of the maze and inside Hannah’s head here… Again, I’ll leave that up to you guys to figure out what’s actually happening.

The key here has been to really build a link between Hannah being “outside of time,” her own thoughts and, as of today’s page, the machine that caused it all. I’m not too sure how obvious all of this has been, but I know that I always love stories that aren’t necessarily linear and that pull together different story elements into something new and different. So I’m hoping that this makes for an interesting read.

The question now is, where does Hannah go from here?

And for that, you’ll have to come back next week to find out. I’m excited to finally share next week’s spread as it turned out super well (better than I expected actually!). Anyway, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next week.

Source: On the Verge