We take a little from both plates, good and bad in this extremely late Spwug posting by yours truly.

First, the bad:

Don Lafontaine, age 68 passed away from lung complications this past Monday.

The King of Voiceovers, silent.

This year so far has been a sad, sad time for some of the great legends, B-grade classics and yet-upcoming personalities. Heath Ledger, Bernie Mac, Issac Hayes, Julius Carry (Sho’Nuff?!), Estelle Getty (The Golden Girls!?) Charlton Heston…

At least they won’t have to be on standby when this thing gets turned on.

And I’ll have shown you guys the way to the good; follow me!:

So, here’s a fun little project, and we’ll kinda touch back through the week (in a shameless attempt to buy back your attention.)  A four panel comic for your perusal!

The first thing for this artist is always the dialogue.  A well-written comic will always be forgiven for any lackluster art, and a beautiful comic will forever be scorned for lame dialogue or plot.  Brevity is truly wit.  Besides, cramming huge scientific jargon blocks or flourishing prose-etry is really, REALLY hard.  At the same time those word bubbles are G-R-E-A-T for obscuring unecessary or frustrating details in a page.  People get it.  You can trust them to fill in the blanks for you.  Understanding your characters well and knowing their reactions to situations makes the dialogue not only ‘pop’, but it also kinda lays out the page in advance; their movements and facial expressions rely on matching the dialogue.

Thumbnailing the comic with quick doodles is like the wet cement to your wordy foundation — placing the word bubbles to give your characters room to move and not get in each others way is essential.  Also, any mistakes you find, you’ll have found early.  Nothing’s worse than long hours of toil, only to find out the layout’s bad or a character’s face doesn’t match the dialogue.   This is all the tough stuff up front.  Everything from here gets easier and it’s when you’ve put up the framework, that you can get to the fun of filling it all in…  that’s for the next post.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Ack!, webcomics, Crybringer, Random, Comedy, anime, stuff, art. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.