Wednesday , April 8 , 2009

    Posted by:

    James

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First off, I love how this strip came out, but can claim no credit whatsoever on it. Sarah wrote this one on top of drawing it. I might become obsolete if things keep moving in this direction.

I could always letter the comics. I suppose that's something. And there's the website to keep up. And all my things are here...

Speaking of lettering, the way a comic's dialogue is arranged isn't something that I really thought much about until I was in the process of creating my own. Then I suddenly realized that there are a dozen little details that need to be kept in mind--the arrangement of the dialogue has to suggest its flow from one character to the next, and the bubbles themselves have to be aesthetically pleasing but minimally invasive.

I was reading through my copy of the first volume of the Hellboy Library Edition collection, and I found myself suddenly taking notice of the way the speech bubbles were constructed, in particular their tails. The tails on the bubbles were very thin, interfering very little with the panels they occupied and making sure that the bubbles themselves were as close to being complete circles as possible.

This is going to sound dumb, but the width of the tails on my speech bubbles is something that's been vexing me for quite some time. I attempted to emulate the Hellboy approach in today's strip, and I'm pretty fond of how it turned out.

Also, as a side note completely unrelated to anything else in this post: women in black underwear? Hot.

-James