Anatomy of a two-page spread from hell....
I finally finished a nasty two-page spread in Skip 27. The left page was a pink, the right was a purple. Ooog. The purple page was conventionally difficult for the most part, so lots of FX over gradient backgrounds, except for one huge vertical word bubble that I'll talk about in a bit. The pink page wasn't too bad as pink pages go, but only because I had the perfect lightning screen tone to go in the background of the word bubble on the left. I also had to do massive wardrobe reconstruction for one panel. That was interesting. But the main reason that pink page was indeed pink was the same word bubble I mentioned on the purple page.
Yes, the same huge vertical word balloon was on both pages. Nakamura Yoshiki, Skip's mangaka, has decided she rather likes a dramatic two-page spread with a word balloon right smack dab in the middle. (IIRC, this is the third one in the past ~3 volumes. At least she doesn't indulge in them very often. *knocks on wood*) This works just great in Japanese, since one column of text can go on the right page, the 2nd column of text can go on the left, and everything's dandy. But...it doesn't work like that in English. Thanks to the horizontal type I almost always have to use, I have three choices: squish the entire sentence onto only one of the pages and leave the other half of the bubble blank, figure out where to put extra space between the words of each line so said empty space will cross the gutter/book spine, or run the type vertically and make the letters big enough that you can still read them, even with the letters split in half.
In the case of this particular two-page spread, I did the latter. The sentence was only one simple word: "No!!", screamed out with lots of Os. Perfect for running vertically. Unfortunately, there was no way to easily align the art of each page, as the word bubble's type was the only thing that crossed the gutter, and any screen tone in the background ended at its page's edge. The bubble pretty much ran the entire vertical length of the pages, and while it was transparent (Nakamura-sensei really loves those, too...) as already mentioned, the background art never crossed the gutter. I finally made a third photoshop file, pasted in both halves of the bubble, and aligned them as best I could. I arranged the type there, and then transferred it to both pages. Each page has the full type on it. I stuck a big white bar down the appropirate edge to cover the type that would be printed on the other page. Blargh.
I started these pages yesterday morning, and tonight I have finally finished them. I am SO VERY GLAD they are done, and before Saiun 5 script arrives. (Yes, still waiting. Perhaps Monday.) It would have been hell dealing with this spread while banging out 8 Saiun pages a day. I finished my last recent Naruto magazine chapter today, too.
If you will excuse me, I think I earned a break! *staggers off*