This week, Quinlan gives Dakkan a hard time for clamming up in front of his father and the king – all in good humor of course. Dakkan, as you might have noticed earlier, brings out Quin’s more lighthearted side, even when he’s in the worst of moods.

Click for full-size

This page is a good example of the interplay that Rachel and I have in the process from script to final page. In any comic script I work on now that isn’t Beyond the Western Deep, I am very particular about how the pages are laid out. I used to be a bit more free-form, but I think giving the script a bit of structure helps the artistic process quite a bit more.

However, in the case of Beyond the Western Deep specifically, I wrote much of the script before adopting that workflow. The script for BWD doesn’t really follow a set template, and Rachel has a lot of latitude in how she approaches the material.

Click for full-size

In this example, the “I’m working on it” line from last week’s page was originally meant to lead in this week’s page. Rachel decided to stick it into the previous page for flow purposes and ultimately I think it works a lot better this way.

Since the line was bumped, we needed to write a new line for the first panel here – this became Quin’s current line here, where he’s thwapping Dakkan over the head for his lack of assistance earlier.