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The Locked Maze 2: Page 7 (mleiv.com)
Medium: SketchBookPro/Photoshop Size: 8.5X11"
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This is probably easiest to read in my facebook collection.

I think I was a little too enamoured of the four-panel conversation row, at the exclusion of other ways I might have approached this page. The Significant Other said it looked like a scene from That 70s Show. :/ In Book I, each page was just a grouping of various "screenshots" with the occasional effort at placing important moments at the end of a page. In Book II, I tend to approach each page with an idea, and force the action to fit it. Which is why I've had so many unattractively text-heavy pages. The whole decision making process here is so much harder than it looks from the finished product. It's actually a lot like programming. There's a lot of arbitrary choices going on which we drape with pretty phrases like "most efficient" and "elegant" and "modern coding conventions," but in reality we just picked one of ten nearly identical ways of solving the problem and - although we will spend the next 20 years re-evaluating that choice in our heads - it's written down and we aren't going to bother changing it now.

2 Comments

Well, you posted this well over a year ago, but I thought I'd chime in and say that the conversation row you've had second thoughts about works very well, IMHO. It's got this breathless-staccato-3rd degree feel that leads right to Holly excusing herself. If that's what you were shooting for, you hit it dead center.

Thanks, and it was what I was trying to present: both the intrusiveness of the comments and the overwhelming nature of a four-front conversation. I think my problem with the layout was just that it was so text-heavy and the trapezoids on black ribbons were too gimmicky. I've never been very comfortable pulling all those comic book stunts, like objects running outside their box, or running over the bleed margins, etc. Those tricks feel forced when I do them. :/ But looking back on it now, it doesn't bother me anymore.

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