Names are good, is the moral of this page. Actually, true story: in the first draft of the story, I’d spent so much time hashing out the actual plot and lines of dialogue and trying to get everything working on a mechanical level that I’d legitimately forgotten to mention just WHO the characters were! I knew what their names were, but I’d neglected to share that information with the reader. Fortunately, Jayelle caught it fairly early on and we were able to recover in subsequent drafts.

Introducing your characters by name so the readers know who they are can be tricky in comics. In Guild Wars 2, lots of characters just have their names floating over their heads, so that makes things a little easier–but here, characters need to speak it, or we need to learn it some other way. Some people use boxes to just give us the names, kind of like the Guild Wars 2 method, but that seems almost like cheating in a way.

Anyway, I’m going on too much about the names. Let’s talk about the page!

As you can see in the thumbnail draft, this was originally a five-panel page. Ultimately, panel three would be split in two, giving Nora’s line about ‘telling the truth’ a little more heft by letting it stand on its own and giving the lutren a unique expression for it, a slight air of good-hearted snark. It works so much better that way, and Jayelle rejiggered the page after it was pretty far along to make it work.

Ultimately, yes, it works way better like this! These are the kinds of observations that really show the value in the collaborative process. I thought the original layout was going to be just fine and approved it, but Jayelle was soon convinced that Nora’s line needed it’s own panel to breathe and asked to make the tweak. With the above page used to prove her rationale, it was hard to say no.

This week for guest art, let’s take a look at a fun piece by Atelier Bagur (aka Veigue) of a tamian character we haven’t seen in a while! Let’s hear it for CRIM!

Yeah, so he’s a bit of a lunkheaded bully, but he’s mostly just upset at the nepotism that shot Quinlan up to the captaincy. Of course, considering everything that’s happened, it’s possible Crim may change his tune. Who knows?!