On the Verge – The Arrow of Time – Page 292-293

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Today’s page is something I’m really excited to share! I’ll explain more after you guys read it…

Click the image for a larger view.

Ok, so a lot of the time (probably most of the time), when I write stories for myself, I have a very good idea of exactly what things are going to look like. I at least have some indication of what to draw. I mean I change things up quite a bit once I start working on layouts and stuff, but I have a starting point in mind to get me going.

But for today’s page (and next week’s) I honestly had no idea. My notes in the script basically said to “…draw ‘moments’ in time and you can figure how to make this look super cool and abstract.” That’s Jay, that’s a big help. Writers man… Anyway, once I sat down and started doing layouts, I started to kick around different ideas until I settled on this idea of picture frames. I liked the idea that Hannah would be looking at all of these different moments in her life. Now if you go back to how the Arrow of Time was explained on pages 206-207, this worked perfectly as a way to visualize things. In the context of the story, the Arrow of Time basically functions as a way to pull people “through” moments – sort of like a film reel. Now people don’t experience these as separate “moments”, just the flow of time. But if you were to take someone out of that time stream, they’d end up seeing these frames.

So with that figured out, it was on.

The next thing to really decide was how to draw all of this. But this was kind of simple solution because I have almost 300 pages of “moments” already drawn. It was just a matter of really going through and picking out separate points throughout the story to fill this page. It was a fun page to draw (even though there were a ton of straight lines to do) and I think once all of the frames were filled in, everything came together really nicely. And since I didn’t have a solid idea for the visual, I kind of surprised myself a bit during the process and the final page is one of my favourites.

And at the end of the day, this page kind of acts as a way to tie everything back to page 1 altogether in a nice little bow.

The other thing I’d really like to point out there is that this whole Arrow of Time idea is actually a great metaphor for comics in general. If you start thinking about how comics are actually constructed – moments of time frozen inside frames that when read sequentially form a story – it’s very similar to how the Arrow of Time actually works here. This is just something that I think is a pretty cool little “extra deconstruction of the story” to add in to all of the story telling. I’m not too sure how many people care about that sort of thing, but I love stories that kind of layer on meanings for you to discover.

Anyway, we’re definitely reaching the critical moments in this chapter and Hannah’s going need to figure out just what to do. Next week, we’ll see just how that starts.

*****

Making comics, making progress!
After a very long spell of not really posting too much behind the scenes work, you’ll have see quite a bit of stuff last week as I got to work on THE BUTTERMAN. My goal at the start of the week was to get about 2/3’s of the pages drawn… and instead I actually managed to finish them all off. So what I’ve been referring to as “principal penciling” is completed, which is awesome! This means that this week I can really focus on any revisions that I want to make (and there are a couple spots for sure that I identified as I was penciling) and then it’s jumping in to rendering. This is the same process I followed during work on ANDREW JACKSON IN SPACE #2 and I think it worked really well and is one of the reasons why those pages turned out as well as they did. So I’m taking the same approach and I’m hoping that the final work is just as good if not better.

Here’s more work-in-progress on the penciling.