I'm a Wordsmith! (Not Really...)

WORD PLAY! 

Greetings friends,

I'm a tired person, but I'm also a writing person and as such I should post some relatively useful things. For today, I thought it'd be nifty to address the dialogue for our latest post. More so than any other piece of text or writing, the dialogue of our comic goes through more permutations than anything else. Some lines are now almost a year old, whereas others are as new as the day before yesterday.

It's getting slowly more efficient as we go along. Frankly, I'm still not that great at fitting the right amount of text/dialogue to a panel. This week in particular, Katy had just performed touch-up on the page this past weekend, so dialogue had to be written shortly before we posted. I ended up writing two different versions for the page below:

My first draft had Rufus singing a song by Ella Fitzgerald throughout the entire page, whereas the other draft had him complaining to himself. For the first two panels, we decided to stick with Rufus singing to himself, because frankly it seemed like Rufus was complaining anytime he was speaking. It was also a good way to show how mundane abuse from the Hawks has become for him, and fleshes out his personality a little more.

At the same time, we removed the song lyrics from the fourth panel. Rufus is supposed to be far away, and having his dialogue featured in a panel he is absent from would have been confusing. We cemented Rufus' proximity from the mob by using the last line of dialogue from my second draft. The end product is a six page panel that establishes the placement of each character with respect to one another, as well as gives some insight into Rufus' personality:

Happy New Fear!

Hey team,

Hope you all had some fun holiday times and finished this year with style, safety, punctuality, and courtesy! Katy and I had a brief window of celebration. Times were had, and now we're right back to webcomicking, working day jobs, and throwing knives at each other.

What I'd like to discuss with this blog update is the importance of a buffer zone for your comic. We have been able to release consistently thanks to the work horse that is Katelyn Amacker, but also thanks to the fact that we prepared as much as we could. This past summer, we wrote and drew like angry, workaholic dragons. From this effect, we have a reserve of panels that can be uploaded weekly while we work on future panels.

The other side of a comic buffer is that your story and art style may have changed slightly as time went by. Personally, we've had to play around with the sequence of some events; largely due to the fact that after about 17 pages we haven't yet had an action sequence. Originally, I had written prioritizing character development and establishing the setting. While that may work well within a novel or a printed issue of a comic, a weekly updated webcomic needs some interstitial moments of energy. Having flipped the chronology around a bit, we had to cash in some of our buffer panels early. However, it was still nice to have that option.

I'll be blogging more frequently as I've recently freed up some time for myself. Until then, I leave you with a late holiday gift. This is a gag gift my friends and I made for a Xmas Eve Eve party. It's long, and manic, but we enjoyed it and I hope you do too. Also, it gets a little dark halfway through, so I don't recommend it for small children...