Annotated Raven's Children - Issue #1: Pages 12 & 13
Er, just a eensy bit late with this one. *facepalm* (I don't even have the excuse the pages aren't already done! They've been done for ten years.)
This was a two-page spread in the original comic, so I figured I'd go ahead and post it that way here, even though the pages could technically stand alone. Sorry for the unavoidable side-scrolling. Also, looking at it as a single image, I think it was clearer when it was printed on two physical pages that the left side was meant to be read first (down to "Well ... most of us") and then resumed on the right side. (Then again, maybe it wasn't clear at all. *g* I was still figuring that stuff out.)
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Several things to talk about on this page! In numbered points, just because.
1. HOLY INFODUMPS, BATMAN. This page was relettered and redrawn for the trade paperback, so at least now you can read it and there is interesting stuff to look at. The original 2000 version, if I remember correctly, was two pages consisting almost entirely of solid, nearly illegible text, aside from the panel at lower right.
I also rewrote it somewhat, since after doing five issues -- the point at which I produced the TPB -- I'd been able to nail down a lot of worldbuilding aspects that had been pretty murky to me in the first issue, so I took the opportunity to fix and revise this part of the explanation. I don't remember what I changed, exactly ... it wasn't major, sweeping changes so much as editing for clarity and adding details that I hadn't figured out yet the first time around. There is a certain amount of foreshadowing here, including the first, probably much too subtle appearance of a science-fiction element in the comic: see the middle panel with the circuit board pattern at the top.
2. I was still doing that thing where I'm not really drawing a clear distinction between Jained's racism and the comic actually being racist itself. (I'm specifically thinking here of the "savage massacre!" imagery in the panel at left.) Which, again, is one of the big things that made me not want to go forward with RC as a series, once I realized what I had been doing and that the first few issues were, in some ways, pretty damn racist. (I mean, yes, I could've and would've tried to do better in future story arcs. But the first few issues would always be people's first introduction to the comic, and I just didn't feel good about it.)
3. Formatting these pages to post on the Internet made me aware yet again of the differences between the comic-book reading experience and the webcomic reading experience. RC was designed, of course, to be read on the printed page, and it exploited a lot of the physical comic medium (page-turns, bleeds, two-page spreads) that simply don't work online. Obviously there are lots of things you can do with a webcomic that you can't do with a printed comic, but comics also exploit their physical form in various ways, and trying to reformat it for the web is making me choose how to best render those effects in a different medium.
This entry is also posted at http://layla.dreamwidth.org/192550.html with
comments.
This was a two-page spread in the original comic, so I figured I'd go ahead and post it that way here, even though the pages could technically stand alone. Sorry for the unavoidable side-scrolling. Also, looking at it as a single image, I think it was clearer when it was printed on two physical pages that the left side was meant to be read first (down to "Well ... most of us") and then resumed on the right side. (Then again, maybe it wasn't clear at all. *g* I was still figuring that stuff out.)
[<-- Previous page] | [Next page -->]
Several things to talk about on this page! In numbered points, just because.
1. HOLY INFODUMPS, BATMAN. This page was relettered and redrawn for the trade paperback, so at least now you can read it and there is interesting stuff to look at. The original 2000 version, if I remember correctly, was two pages consisting almost entirely of solid, nearly illegible text, aside from the panel at lower right.
I also rewrote it somewhat, since after doing five issues -- the point at which I produced the TPB -- I'd been able to nail down a lot of worldbuilding aspects that had been pretty murky to me in the first issue, so I took the opportunity to fix and revise this part of the explanation. I don't remember what I changed, exactly ... it wasn't major, sweeping changes so much as editing for clarity and adding details that I hadn't figured out yet the first time around. There is a certain amount of foreshadowing here, including the first, probably much too subtle appearance of a science-fiction element in the comic: see the middle panel with the circuit board pattern at the top.
2. I was still doing that thing where I'm not really drawing a clear distinction between Jained's racism and the comic actually being racist itself. (I'm specifically thinking here of the "savage massacre!" imagery in the panel at left.) Which, again, is one of the big things that made me not want to go forward with RC as a series, once I realized what I had been doing and that the first few issues were, in some ways, pretty damn racist. (I mean, yes, I could've and would've tried to do better in future story arcs. But the first few issues would always be people's first introduction to the comic, and I just didn't feel good about it.)
3. Formatting these pages to post on the Internet made me aware yet again of the differences between the comic-book reading experience and the webcomic reading experience. RC was designed, of course, to be read on the printed page, and it exploited a lot of the physical comic medium (page-turns, bleeds, two-page spreads) that simply don't work online. Obviously there are lots of things you can do with a webcomic that you can't do with a printed comic, but comics also exploit their physical form in various ways, and trying to reformat it for the web is making me choose how to best render those effects in a different medium.
This entry is also posted at http://layla.dreamwidth.org/192550.html with
comments.