Back to the Thumbnailing Board

Although I thought I was well along on my pencils, turns out I'm gonna have to do some reworking. I was going over them with Shawn Crystal and he pointed out that I wasn't directing; I was showing part of this particular scene with no narrative decisions (just a flat, straightforward portrayal of the action and dialogue), and as a result the reader doesn't know whether to be concerned, relieved, etc... and he was 100% right. I'm not pushing my angles in this scene, I'm not playing with action or body language, I'm not using my "camera," I'm just not using all the storytelling elements at my disposal, and I'm gonna have to rework the latter part of this scene (the preceding pages are fine).

Here's a page which will most likely never be seen; a few panels might make it out, but the rest... ces la vie.



The little ship (while in reality being far more menacing and dangerous than its cumbersome counterpart) doesn't look like much of a threat, and its diminutive appearance in the wide shot sort of negates the intended impact of its own arrival. Setting up that shot was a real pain, though. There also needs to be more going on aboard the larger ship to build tension for the (probably murderous) consequences of the smaller ship's arrival. Anyway, the next few days will be a "back to the drawing board" type of deal.

Liz looked extra cute today when she came home from work, so I drew a picture of her. She was wearing a black dress that apparently she's had for a while but that I don't remember seeing.



And, as usual, research excites me. As I read further back from the period on which I'm working in order to gain a better comprehensive overview of that period, I start to get into the aforementioned preceding timeframe. Now I'm considering pushing the Crogan family tree back to the early 1600s, but if I do that I likely won't stop. If I focus on the Baroque then I'll want to get into the Elizabethan, which segues oh so smoothly into the whole Henry VIII stuff, with the Irish rebellions and the dissolutions of the Monasteries, and if you're doing Henry then you may as well play up the intrigue of the whole Tudor transition, and then you're smack in the medieval, and how can you avoid those delectable Crusader possibilities? It's a slippery slope, to be sure; the family tree is going to be poster-sized before long and I'll be stuck making Crogan books for the next seventy years... but that probably wouldn't be so bad.

Here's a sketch I did in studio today: a potential villain for a Baroque-era Crogan who serves as a diplomatic envoy to France and Spain? Literal "cloak and dagger" stuff...