When I wrote the original draft of the script for this scene back in what feels like the stone age (but was more like 2007), this entire exchange was nonexistent. Actually, the first three pages of this chapter were literally squeezed onto a single page. Thinking back, I’m still not sure why we did this. I’m sure it had something to do with the fact that neither of us knew anything about making comics.

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The pacing on display was just so incredibly, amazingly, horrendously rushed, and not an iota of time was spent introducing any of the characters, giving them personalities, establishing relationships, etc etc etc. Nowadays I look back on this first draft of the script and kinda-sorta cringe uncontrollably. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to revisit pretty much everything with the new draft, and I took the opportunity to give Quinlan and Janik a little friendly banter to establish a few things that I felt were important to establish. If there’s one thing I love to write, it’s fun back-and-forth banter.

As you can see, the thumbnail is a little bit different than the final page – just the normal process of laying things out and seeing what flows best when you clean up the initial sketches. The long initial panel was split into two to accommodate Quinlan’s changing expressions based on the knowledge Janik gives him (and his B| expression in panel 2 gives me a chuckle every time I see it). The bottom section remained large at 2/3 of the page, but we combined the two panels into one, since a close-up of that magnitude seemed rather out of place in the flow of the scene.

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And here we have the cleaned up pencils of the final version of the page. A couple of minor changes were made when the final text was added to the word balloons, mostly to make the best use of panel space, but aside from that, once Rachel nailed this layout we pretty much stuck with it to the final page.

No fan art this week, but I will toss up a really cool sketch of main character Quinlan that Rachel did in a doodling session last week!

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Remember, if you have any fan art that you would like to send us to have featured on the site, send it to thewesterndeep (at) gmail (dot) com!

Also, a quick announcement for folks attending next weekend’s PAX East expo in Boston: an Xbox Live Arcade game that I’ve been working on, Dust: An Elysian Tail, will be playable at the Microsoft booth! I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday throughout the day to chat with folks about the game, so stop by and say hi if you’re visiting the expo!

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