Thoughts on the Prologue
Prologue is up and already I can say drawing Wes so often is a treat!
So far it's only an adaptation of the game's intro, but we took the approach of "don't fix what isn't broken". It was the most ideal way to get used to the environment, the characters, and the general workflow of how this is gonna be.
For this comic I'm gonna try to keep it loose when it comes to the art style. Our first long-term project suffered a lot from trying to keep a consistent style through its run, but the problem was that I didn't quite know what I was doing at the beginning, so I kept dragging those bad practices with me 2 years into the process like some sort of obligation. I think it's good to be aware of your shortcomings as an artist, way more than trying to fit into a mold that just doesn't accommodate your process nor what is the joy you find in art. So far so good; I had a blast with this first issue!
THE THUMBNAILS
A thing we did end up keeping from that first project was the format though. For a long time we would do an issue a month, and this issue would contain 7 pages. Initially it was an arbitrary number, then we noticed it adapted really well to a release schedule of a page a day through a particular week of the month, and then it just became a perfect soft-limit on how to keep the relevant of a chapter self-contained. At the time it felt like a pretty good idea, and a good guiding light considering we didn't know how to start when it came to making comics.
Matt has no emotional attachment to comics as an art form, but he's a brilliant designer. I carry my manga phase with me and read the occasional webtoon before bed, but only let that affect how I lay out panels or pages. I think this arrangement works really well, as it's only the two of us working on this and would rather get it finished before we leave this mortal plane if we can help it, so we avoid any padding of plot points for the sake of pacing. The format I previously mentioned works really well with that in mind, although the biggest flaw is that it can feel a bit brief from time to time. With Colosseum we're trying to give it more pages when we feel it's necessary, and hopefully it'll be the best of both worlds if we can harness it well.
We rearranged the panels from the last 2 pages last minute by moving Gonzap's reaction shot from page 9 to 8, since we wanted to make sure the last impression was of our main characters and the spread of the Orre desert. It's one of those things that we caught in time since I did all of the lines first and let Matt color, while I was catching up on the shading of earlier pages. He gets to see what works and doesn't work with a fresh pair of eyes and make these sort of last minute tweaks I couldn't have noticed while I'm just focusing on the technical stuff.
You also get to see how horrible our thumbnails are, but that's the magic of it: once more, plenty room to have fun with the actual layout of the panels when it's time to sketch it proper. It's surprising how much shitty doodles do the lifting when it comes to laying things out and having a plan, since you're not floating in space with no guidance, but also they're easily discardable if you come up with something better. If anyone out there is having trouble on the preproduction phase of a comic, I can vouch for shitty thumbnails any day of the week.
THE CRITTER DESIGN
we're exercising that design muscle with Wes' dogs and the big metal bird, and most of this without much of a planning phase for their designs. Our goal is to retell the story of Colosseum moreso than trying to make a cohesive set of critters that could make up a fakedex, so we're just letting the designs fit what's on the page at the time and rolling with it, at least for the occasional appearances.
The dogs did go through a few iterations to kinda get the handle of what overall design mentality we wanted and it's likely I'll use them as a guiding light as we go on. When it came to the birdie, we borrowed from Stymphalian Birds and reworked it from there, and it seems to be the better approach; trying to use the actual 'mons as a starting point hasn't been very productive given their designs already work so well, it's hard to iterate on them without it feeling arbitrary.
In an ideal world I'm sure I'd find the time to design every individual appearance of a 'mon before it's time to put it on the page, but failed attempts have been brutally honest about how I don't exactly have good character design practices: if I like one I'll be absolutely biased and go for it. If I need to do iterations it's probably because I don't like any of them so far. The way we're scheduling this means that I don't get to deliberate too much on what the ideal way of presenting certain critters is and I think it's for the best in this particular scenario; again, serve what's on the page, and maybe one day I'll polish them into a diamond once I get enough of a feel of how to make their designs purely practical.
THE CHARACTERIZATION
Another happy accident of this method has been Gonzap and his characterization; we didn't come up with the idea of him trying to pry open the gate with his bare manly hands until the previous page was done up and the lights were off, and I think it's one of my favourite moments in this little intro. We like Gonzap, and as you'll probably hear plenty of times in the near future, we're not big fans of how XD treats him nor the tone of this setting, so we'll be using any chance to ground him back as a serious character... which of course doesn't mean getting rid of his funny mustache. At some point in time I thought these more animesque characteristics were getting in the way of Colosseum's tone, by now it's a matter of full embrace of Orrewave and I can humbly hope to make it justice.
All of this said, I'd hardly call ourselves gardeners; the truth is that what lets us have fun is knowing we have this reliable chapter structure to fall back on, and we have a good measurement of what needs to happen both in the long and short term so we don't hit any roadblocks. So far it's been a winning formula for us and I think this little chapter is a testament to that.
We've been discussing the idea for this project for ages now, and several times where we said we wouldn't do it just based on scope and how we couldn't possibly spend this much time doing essentially what is a fan-project, but when we're being completely honest we keep coming back to this story and discussing how good it'd be to display the story beats as we envision them, so... here's the first stepping stone. Just went for it, applied a method we're familiar with, and we'll see where it takes us.