We’re back with another look at the creative process behind DROWSE! This month, we’re giving you insight into the collaborative back-and-forth involved in creating comics in a team setting.
While there are distinct stages to the production of a comic that occur in a specific order (writing, penciling, inking, coloring, lettering, etc.), it’s a bit reductive to think of the creative team as an assembly line. In fact, the comic is a fluid object throughout its production. Every member of the creative team — no matter how late in the process their role occurs — actively brings creative decisions to the table that can spark a re-thinking of earlier ones. The development of page 8 of Chapter Two is a good example of that.
On this page, the speech delivered by Joachim Scholz, leader of the People’s Project, was worked and reworked literally up to the moment we sent the chapter to our letterer, Taylor. Once we saw Jaime’s insanely hypnotic art, we knew we couldn’t obscure it with an overly-verbose speech. It forced us to pare down the speech for maximum impact and re-work which part of it took on the transitional “page turn” function in the last panel. Taylor also collaborated with our editor, Kev, to devise the singular way in which the newspaper quote read by Scholz is presented in panel 1. Compare an early draft of the script to the finished page:
