The Explorers - Thumbnails and Revisions
- GenreChowderStudios
- Aug 3, 2017
- 3 min read
Making a comic, be it a lengthy graphic novel or just a few panels, can be a wildly complicated thing. I'm working on a short comic adventure for my channel, and in an effort to give it my all, it's quickly become wildly complicated. And I felt like sharing the process that very often feels like a void of madness. So if you like, feel free to follow the production of "The Explorers." Thanks either way.
Here, we have the thumbnailing stage, where the general gist of the whole thing is put to paper (or tablet, doesn't matter). It's a rough leg of the journey, not meant to be particularly good-looking or represent any kind of illustrative skill past one basic thing: the action must be clear to all parties involved in the process. Seeing as I'm a one-man band, per se, this stage only needs to be totally legible to me, but it still reads well, more or less. At any rate, because beauty is not required here, I don't need to be precious with anything I draw. Which means I don't have to keep everything I draw.
I may or may not have said this before, but the world that Jay and Hudson are from is based heavily on video game tropes, gamer culture, gamer archetypes, and my experience with games overall. Here, one of the archetypes I originally wanted to play with was that one space-wasting AFK scum. He's the cigar-chomping greaser-looking guy on Page 2, Panel 15. His role, I think, is amusing, especially given the circumstances that occur later on... but he doesn't do anything. Yes, I know. That's the point. But I mean, he doesn't do anything. He does almost nothing for the story.
In a much larger and longer story, he would have room to be a more interesting character, even given his inspiration. But here, there's no time. There's no space for him. This is especially true because there are no words. Simplicity is key. Streamlining is key. There's no room for extraneous material that exists for the sake of a joke. In refining my pencils, I'll just ignore him...
So if you can delete a whole character from a comic strip, you can delete moment beats as well. More may be up for a goodbye, but Page 3's Panel 24 is most likely not going to be in the final version. It's a nice shot, and if the revised version without Mr. AFK improves the pacing enough, I might keep it, but as of now, it's rather unnecessary.
Sometimes, it takes the completion of the first draft to know when you need to dump panels. Sometimes, you draw it, look at it, and "nope."
The top left two panels and single bottom left panel on Page 4 were insta-dumps. They either interfered with the pacing or were just plain out of my skill range. I could have erased them, I guess, but there's something permanent and disheartening about erasing work. At this stage, there's no point risking possibly derailing myself, especially since I, at the time, was working on a tight schedule. Because it was at the rough thumbnailing stage, I figured, "Hey, just cross it out and draw something new."
There is no dialogue. Really, the medium of chronologically linear video is not fit for heavy text, given my individual writing/editing abilities. But past the technical reasons, I love pantomime. I love pantomime. The information conveyed by pure physicality, the feelings expressed by faces alone, and the imagination involved in filling in all unspecified particulars like thoughts, spoken words, the passage of time, having to communicate solely through stylized action... It's almost cartooning at its purest. You can't fall back on dialogue. It really comes down to nothing but the ability, your ability, to show the story. Whether or not I'm successful in my attempt to do such a thing will remain to be seen.
Thanks again for sticking around. God willing, I hope to blog more about the process "The Explorers." Stay tuned.
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