Here are early versions of two spreads from ‘Timeline,’ another story from M. The big vertical line shows me where each page will end in print. The horizontal line comes from my original idea that the entire story would function as a literal timeline, with vertical lines connecting each set of panels to that central line to create a visual timeline. However, I couldn’t come up with a good way to do this. All those vertical lines crowded the page and messed up the composition. Eventually I came up with the solution of titling the story ‘Timeline,’ which hopefully tells the reader how the story is structured while preserving all of that nice white space.
‘Timeline’ was drawn completely digitally. I’m not sure how I came to that decision but it was useful this piece, allowing me to rework and rearrange panels in a very iterative manner – if you compare these images to the final book, you’ll see that a few of the panels here were moved to other parts of the story. Aside from a few vague ideas I didn’t plan this piece in advance, but just added, subtracted, and moved sets of panels until it felt right. I’m not sure how I feel about the look of my digital drawings, though.
One trick in the story that I liked was a panel saying “Imagine this repeats at regular intervals going forward.” Then panels of the same color appear several times later in the story. I stole this from an astounding moment in Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, when he does a similar thing much better in prose.
My approach to coloring for this book operated within a defined but lose framework. Beginning with ‘Clogged Drains, Forgotten Words,’ I decided on a vague mood and feeling which would be associated with each color. That determined the coloring for the rest of the comic. This isn’t something that I expect or hope a reader will ‘solve’ – and on a related note, I have been thinking about how to present these somewhat disjointed narratives in a way that seems less like a puzzle to be put back together. Still, I do hope that some of these decisions will operate in the background and influence a reader’s understanding of the work on some level.