Cat on a Roof

Take1

Observed from my living room the other day, and luckily, I happened to have the zoom lens camera to hand.

The cat took about five minutes to figure out the safe way down, trying one thing after another. Describing this maze-walking algorithm via the panel layout, a flattening of the geometry of the house seemed appropriate.

I love working with regular grids on the whole, in part because I don't have to think to much about the layout. This exercise forced me to do a bit more thinking, emphasising long drops, distance and tight turns in the panel shapes.

Take 2

But wait, look at the middle row - at this point, the cat changes direction, and starts to walk from ight to left across the rooftop. I've depicted this as a series of panels arranged left to right, in the conventional (Western European/Anglicised) reading direction. the reader has to scull across the page in the opposite direction to the cat, and it comes off a little muddled.

But if I order the panel sequence right to left, won't that be equally confusing?

I think it worked, don't you? I broke one of the fundamental reading directions, so helped guide the reader by preserving the other : top to bottom. To guide the eye, I've staggered the middle row downwards a little, and created a smoother reading experience that better describes our protagonist's epic journey!

Take 3

seeing as I'm all loosened up now, panel-wise, let's add a little flourish. I wasn't fast enough to catch a snap of the cat in mid-air, but picking on some random cat from google images, I can add a silhouette easily enough.

This moment is the finale of the story - the cat makes the leap from rooftops to ground, from imprisonment to freedom, from faith to knowledge, from here to eternity, from Russia with love... well, you get the idea. In previous takes, this happened between the panels, in the reader's imagination, and that's no bad thing - in fact it's at the very core of reading comics.

Here I've made the leap more explicit, but still not depicted it quite as explicitly as the rest of the strip:
- no borders, signifying the transient, almost mythic status of this moment
- the cat's flying through the sky, so echo the sky colours from the first two panels, helping to pull everything together
- I made the strange and scary leap away from an A4 page, embracing the possibilities of digital comics, and the infinite plane that Scott McCloud's been extolling us to use for over a decade!

Here it is then - what have I gained and lost by pulling the climactic finale out of the gutter (that's the little white space between the panels) and onto the page?

Hitch Hiker

In the news: http://io9.com/camera-traps-capture-fantastically-bizarre-animal-hit-1636358011

A genet (a cat-like animal) has been caught on auto-triggering infra-red night camera riding on the backs of buffalo and rhino, behaviour never observed before. I wonder what they're both thinking?

The sketch was also an attempt to figure out some of the magic done by the late Sergio Toppi, italian comics maestro extraordinaire, whose black and white work is an incredibly intricate interplay between solid whites and blacks, and passages of amazingly fluid detail. I would hesitate to compare this to his stuff, but I felt I'd got a better understanding of how he does his compositions after I'd finished. Go look him up on google, or better yet, get a copy of his "Sharaz-De" from Archaia.

Finally, apologies to the genet for making it look like a sock puppet!

Twelve Easy Pieces

When I'm not doing comics, I'm often found doing code. Here's an experiment that combines the two. I've cut out 42 roughly equal-sized panels from drawings that I've done, and randomly recombined them on top of a six panel script. Look at how the words and pictures dance together, and modify each other's meanings!

The drawings are rather rough. The script is hardly epic (yet!). But I'm already quite excited by the possibilities of this. So excited, in fact, that I'm breaking the usual schedule to post this right now!!

The internal repetition on the first one was a lucky accident. Both silent panels (I think these are important in comics storytelling in general) came out the same. Or the weeping muscular figure in variant #5, reprised in the ending of variant #11.

Sketch