Finally figured out a layout for my final prequel mini-comic which works for me, or which I can at least get away with.
I had really struggled with this one, and let it sit for a month. (In the meantime I was doing media preservation work, which you may have seen elsewhere.)
Mentally I did not want to finish this project in some ways. It's been a lot of work.
This was also a weird one for a lot of reasons. The script wasn't finished. There's tons of characters, and I couldn't seem to cut that down. It's on the sea, which suggests long widescreen views, and there's action which wasn't fitting into the allotted two pages (of a current total of fourteen).
It wasn't even clear to me exactly what happens in the comic. This was a pretty generic script. The guest character here is also derivative of a well known character, but I've decided to roll with that for now. (On the grounds of, well, what else would this character possibly look like?)
On the last comic, I started removing panel borders and letting the "panels" be double wide. So I did that on this too, allowing for 3-5 characters in a panel and some wide views.
I struggled with it, and you sort of have to assume a story takes place inbetween panels. But I cut it down to four moments which work I think, and give a sense of what happens.
I was reminded of the basketball game from X-Men #4 (a teenage favorite), and of how one punchline is delivered as a caption rather than shown. You don't have to have a panel for everything. There's a storybook-like assertion here, that four isolated moments are enough to fill in the story, without other connective tissue.
A month ago I'd done a basic layout with stock poses, but I'd done some very loose sketches to liven up the comic beyond those stock poses, and that's what I'll be drawing now. Stock poses are part of the aesthetic of these comics but I use them sparingly, when a character is behaving in a stock way. I'd spent quite a bit of time drawing model-sheet versions of the characters during the design phase, most of which made it into the comics somewhere.
There is still the matter of the story this is a prequel to, which would have played out in a video game. I'd like to suggest this with ancillary spinoff material for now.
At one point I thought about having a creepy/meta element to this minicomic, referencing that (in-universe) it's a remake of an earlier version. This ultimately felt inappropriate. Within these last pages I've instead been trying to represent these characters as they would want to be represented, and make sure we see them as part of the team.
For the most part, these mini-comics are not about drama and trauma. I wanted them to be as straightforward as possible, almost to the point of lacking subtext, so that these characters are introduced straightforwardly in their original intended context. What else is a prequel for?
In the previous mini-comic, a single page of comic is actually made up of twenty-five or so drawings inked on paper, then combined and corrected digitally, and that's not unusual here. It takes a lot of work, planning and thought to make these look as clean as they do, and I hope people enjoy the result.