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Gentle doppelgängers
Hello! In this newsletter we take a look at the latest comic, a peek at a cover, and add some new were-creatures from Patreon.
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Comic: finished
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This was a long one. I had fun with this story, particularly with the drawing of backgrounds. Probably the most methodical part was keeping up the consistency of the characters: their clothes, glasses, hair. And even after some rounds of redrawing and correction, I still can see some mistakes. But I think the story in the end has a nice flow to it. It’s a gentle tale, according to some readers; unusual, in that sense, in the eerie tradition of doppelgänger stories. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you can read the full comic here.
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Cover sketch
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The idea is to put the three Lydia Ray stories I’ve made so far in a digital comic book that will be soon available as PDF. I’ve been working the layout of the first two, in order to fit a comic book page format, and changing the text balloons and fonts for consistency and legibility. Luckily I made the latest Lydia comic with the book format in mind, so the version I uploaded to the website is the webtoon version, and the one for the PDF is already done. The comic book one is how it was originally laid out.
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I’ve been doing this long enough to remember all the comings and goings of trying to find the right format for the different screens, basically since posting comics online started to be a thing. For a while, the prevalent idea was to mimic a wide screen of computers with landscape format comics. Another idea, even more revolutionary, was to consider the screen as an instance of content that would flow in front of the reader’s eyes.
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Scott McCloud had the right idea
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This was, for all effects except distribution, webtoons before webtoons. A window, or a frame, while the comic strip run through it like a filmstrip. It implied a heavy repurposing of the comic book format, and not a lot of people were enthusiast about it back then. Even now, western comics are still very reluctant to produce graphic narratives that fit that model, in spite of the booming market of webtoons. I guess they see webtoons as a whole separated world, more akin to manga and anime in terms of market and demographic. Also, it doubles the amount of work for the artists team, since you need to move layers around and speech balloons to adjust the comic for a vertical presentation and in most cases, work on a different size and proportion of the panels overall.
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But, since I’m not tied to fixed schedules or specific publishing strategies, I can experiment with it, and quickly move things around, even if it implies sometimes making drastic cuts or resizing of the drawings. That’s one of the advantages of self editing. Cropping a panel here and there may not make me completely happy, but in time I hope to get the trick right to avoid a few larger changes, and on the plus side, the reaction in engagement and legibility on the strips repurposed for phone reading really makes the effort worth it now.
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Were...creatures?
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I keep drawing werewolf patrons! I always knew I couldn’t have them all done by Halloween, so the timing is not an issue, but I’m at last having the end of this reward in sight, with only a few left. This time, some other were-creatures and new background locations were added.
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That's all for this edition of the Secret Knots newsletter! Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great weekend.
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