Now that it’s been available for a few weeks, I wanted to talk a bit more about my process for the stories in M.
Above are early versions for pages from ‘A Long List of Good Reasons Why Not’ followed by the final pages. This is the final story in the book but the second one I drew. After I finished this initial story, I found myself continuing to think about the characters in it and their lives. I guess other cartoonists talk about this a lot but it was a new feeling for me, maybe because some of my work is less character driven.
That first story was driven by text, with images playing a secondary or accompanying role. I wanted to see if I could replicate that approach but come up with a different tone and appearance for this second story. Generally my instinct is to make comics with less text, so for both of these stories I tried to push back again that. I’ve often found it’s useful to identify a specific characteristic in my work and see what happens when I change that particular thing. Sometimes this can be very difficult to do!
So anyways I had three components: (1) about 15 pages of text (2) 20 large drawings for the background images (3) 30-40 small drawings for the inset images. I combined these components together, laying out the physical pages on the floor and rearranging them until things fit. I’ve grown to really love this part, mixing/matching/discarding words and images to make things work together. It feels very uniquely ‘comics.’
The first version without panels as seen above seemed off because the rhythm and reading order of the page wasn’t clear. The significance of the smaller image was deemphasized as well, which I didn’t like. So I tried again with panels and things seemed to work better, though I would still like to do something more collage-y as that first version is in the future.