Thursday, January 21, 2010

Forever is a long long time when you lost your way

I am really happy with the art of Over the Surface (my thesis comic) so far. Each page starts out with a panic and ends with me proud of how it turned out. However, I'm concerned that I scripted the whole thing completely wrong for the time/content parameters given by the thesis.

I wanted something that could be a stand-alone short story and also set up elements for a much longer one, but I made the classic mistake of going too epic and needing chapters and chapters just to establish things. I just feel like, at this point, I should have written a good 40-page story instead. I have other long projects I want to work on next year, so why did I feel the need to write 3 graphic novels' worth...? Just in case? It came at the cost of what might have been a good short story.

Maybe this isn't the sort of thing I should put on display, but I prefer being open with you guys, and writing it out helps me to learn.

/SELF-DEPRECATING RANT

2 comments:

Matt said...

You'll get there, Tally. Keep at it!

Jesse Hamm said...

If you want to cut it down to a more manageable size, you could always "telescope" certain legs of the story with a nice montage. Pick several scenes you can afford to breeze past, draw a page-worth of imagery representing those scenes, and sum it up with a caption: "Many were our adventures, but we finally reached the castle." Later on, you can fill in those gaps with as many pages as you want, but montages could buy you time in the short run.