Blood of My Blood - Part 4.1: A Secret

We Meet Zoe's Mom

Last Friday was the one-year mark for this blogsletter.

Year two, let’s go!

Stay on after the panels for a peek into one of the big and constant challenges of creating comic art: balancing the level of specificity vs. time.

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Blood of My Blood is a magical realist graphic short story with horror undertones for everyone searching for their body's "Owner's Manual".

Need to catch up on the story so far? Links to all the parts are here:

Blood of My Blood

Part 3.2 « Home » Part 4.2

Part 4.1

Part 3.2 « Home » Part 4.2

William’s Notes

One of the big challenges with creating comics/graphic novels is balancing the level of specificity, detail, and rendering in the art versus the need for speed.

It’s such a time consuming artform that you can’t treat every panel with the time and attention that you’d give to a stand-alone illustration or painting if you want to complete things in a reasonable timeframe. Also, in general the audience is going to take in the artwork quickly as the narrative flows along, instead of marinating in it like they would for stand-alone illustrations/paintings.¹

At the end of the day, it comes down to what the author(s) want to create and their abilities. Is the comic mainly about the semantic narrative? Does a simpler, even more “amateurish”-looking, execution actually improve the effect (like with humor strips)? Or are there specifics of the images in the creator’s head that are key to communicating the ideas to the audience? Maybe there aren’t any words at all, and it is all about the images. Though, even with a wordless comic, you still need to decide how much time and care to put into each panel.²

I’d say that there were aspects of the visuals that were essential to making my vision in Phased legible to readers—what I wanted to describe would have been very difficult to do in a compelling way with just words.

Anyway, I’m rambling! All this to give you some helpful background for the following thoughts on today’s release.

I really like how these panels feel; the level of description feels relatively rich as far as comics go. Buuut I also worry that I’m slipping a little toward my default inclination of more detailed and “naturalistic” description.

As a one-man show, especially if I want to tell longer stories, I’ll need to keep working toward developing a more efficient style.

Just gotta keep evolving my approach and playing with the balance.

And/or, you know, get better and faster at making art. ;)

1. Of course, that’s not always the case, and thank you readers who do stop to smell the comic art flowers!

2. Fascinatingly, on a related note, I recently learned that although Americans tend to prioritize the story over the art while Europeans prioritize the art over the story! I appreciate this because I’d heard a few times that “a good story can save bad art, but good art can’t save a bad story”, which, as an illustwriter who puts a lot of effort into my art, it feels nicer if all that effort is considered worthwhile.

I also heard only once someone say the reverse, that they believed good art could save a weak story but not the reverse.

I’d say both are important to me—if either the art or the story are bad, I’m probably not going to read the comic.