Preview: Page 107, before and after

Here’s a preview page from “Hereville.” These preview pages can have spoilers, so don’t look if you’d rather not see!

This time I’m showing one of the pages that got redrawn between the first version of Hereville, and the graphic novel. I show both versions, so you can see how they compare.

(Info on buying Hereville is here.)

Page 107 from the graphic novel:

Compare that to page 27 from the earlier, self-published “Hereville”:

Mostly just a new inking and coloring job, plus I did a fair amount of redrawing heads and faces in minor ways. But I also made a big change, replacing four panels from the original with one larger, rewritten panel.

Why the change? First of all, the way the cut panels were written felt a little “out of character” for Mirka — that kind of over-the-top sarcasm doesn’t seem like her. Having her yell like Lucy yelling at Linus seemed much better.

Secondly, to me having lots of long narrow panels on a page indicates tension. But having that many long narrow panels on this page struck me as going over-the-top with the tension for this point in the scene, and didn’t leave much room for building up to more tension later on in this scene. Cutting down from 9 to 6 panels “relaxes” this page a lot, to my eye. (So did getting rid of the not-very-meaningful trailing of Mirka to the edge of the page in the bottom row of panels).

Plus, I love the “pushing Zindel with the word balloon” effect (something I swiped from Dave Sim’s comic book Cerebus, although many other cartoonists have done it — most famously Charles Schulz in Peanuts). The new panel is one of my favorite panels in the entire book.

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