Ok the X-Men Alpha Flight arc maybe my favorite of the bunch.. and that's saying a lot! Gosh dawg John you can tell a great tale and the artwork is top notch pack with tons of energy. Thank you for this magical journey!
I may have to print out the handful of Shaman pages from this issue and the last, just to have around for when I need a pick-me-up. Such beautiful work, JB!
Love the consistent comic book logic when it comes to story telling. Villain vanquished, wrap up the scene so it’s put to bed. Clean and tidy. ‘til JB wants to cause trouble again, of course! This whole thing is epic. Thanks, JB.
Nothing to do with today’s page, but I set myself a small challenge today.
I’d started a page about a week ago, then decided it would work better deeper into the issue. So I set it aside with only two panels drawn. But as sometimes happens my plot deflected slightly to the side, and I realized I would not need the unfinished scene. So we decided to flip the page over and use the “back” for today’s page. Only Jim Warden doesn’t like it when I do that, so I decided to erase the two panels and the other borders.
Unless……. What if I erased the art but kept the panels, and found a way to fit today’s action to panels intended for something else entirely?
That's a pretty neat trick! Considering the pacing of individual pages can vary so much, it's cool to find that what you had in mind would work with what you had ready--sans the pre-existing art.
Getting these pages one day at a time makes me focus in different ways than I might otherwise had I read the entire issue as a whole. Probably the inverse of what happens when I receive a collection of multiple issues at once. Anyway, one page at a time like we get here has me pondering about the panel choices: their size, angles, number, double borders, no borders, which comes first in a chicken/egg scenario, etc
The last comment gives me a smidge of an insight into this, thanks!