Chapter 2, Page 18 – “Bad Fit” (click image to go to the full page)

Chapter 2, Page 18 – “Bad Fit”:

Chapter 2 was a tumultuous experience. Production was halted halfway through the chapter and wasn’t completed for a year. Some of the art in it got rushed and I wasn’t my most confident with the storytelling of it, leading to a lot of second guessing along the way.

However, I will say that the first handful of pages of the second half of the chapter (when I came back from the year away from it) are some of my strongest, with this page being a prime example.

The raw line art of this page.

In it, I got to play with a few different styles––from my standard cartoony style to a more rendered, moody style in the last panel, to playing with ideas from animation––which allowed me to craft some of my best visual storytelling.

A quick animated gif of the four middle panels.

I think about the four panels in the middle a lot and how well they work not only as a sequence but as a look in to Long John’s character. He’s the only thing with color, but not shaded because at that moment he has no depth––he’s just rage and selfishness, enhanced by his concern for his hat.

If anything, this page (and the few around it) really signaled the type of storytelling I would emphasize and improve upon in the following two chapters.