ALIEN age 11 - Comic/Graphic Novel and Blog: It gets worse [67] 2012

Ripley face to face with Giger's Xenomorph! - alien comic page

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2012

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It Gets Worse [67]

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Art Notes

Here, after 2 months of waiting, is the shocker. What - end the story with a giant rubber lizard?

I couldn't resist one final shocking metamorphosis! But I'm sorry that you all had to wait for so long to see this. Serious webcomickers must keep to a regular publication schedule or they lose their audience. The internet is a very crowded place now, full of God knows how many thousands - hundreds of thousands? - of talented people offering wonderful material; and even people who aren't very artistically talented who do very interesting work indeed. As creatives we live in a more competitive world than ever.

I'm really pleased with this page. I was also very pleased with the first of the new ones - when I did it - but it's become clear to me that I've gone way beyond it with this one. What I need to work on now is sticking to a layout that doesn't have to be re-jigged afterwards to fit. I have a habit of straying way outside of my panels during the pencilling stage! I also need to speed up. This must have taken nearly 2.5 days!

Script

I won't make any great claims for my writing! I reintroduced the 'My lucky star' song from the film here because I needed something other than more 'OH MY GODs'. I considered having no text at all on this one - just silent horror! The 'Game over' and 'Lucky Star' text however gives a sense of conflicting emotions and confusion. Resignation mixed with denial! Another thing to work on is editing the pages down I seem to be taking a lot of pages to convey the action. It's a skill of the good comic writer which I hadn't appreciated when I was young. To get a story to fit a fixed number of pages without it appearing rushed. I'm sure smaller panels and more text per page helps to slow the reader down but then you need to think of rhythm and sustaining the reader's interest.