Otto & Olya Page 2 Commentary

Storytelling-wise this page remained mostly the same from its original version:

Looking back on it, I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the pose of the DJ in the second panel, I felt that it could be more interesting/sexier, and put a little more care into the equipment in the booth. The large panel of the crowd in the club also felt a little sloppy and lazy to me, the figures are really just a detail-less blob and I wanted to put in some more definable characters - which took considerably more time but I feel like the end result was worth it. If I have one complaint to myself about the new version of the page it’s that the club feels a little too large now, the crowd stretches off into the distance making it feel a little more like an arena concert than an underground club - but I am resisting all of my insane urges to redraw that. We can consider it surreal!

 I also wanted to add a couple of extra “ aspect to aspect” panels to give a little more flavor to the scene. Just before redrawing this page I happened to be at a DJ friend’s house party with a bunch of people taking turns spinning, and I took the opportunity to take some reference photos of hands working the equipment:

The template of this whole club introduction scene is of course the “blood rave” from the beginning of Blade (1998), which remains one of the coolest opening scenes to a movie. I wanted to capture that kind of feeling but wasn’t sure how I could represent the music, especially since the music in that scene was instrumental. I decided to choose a track that had lyrics that I could incorporate in lettering, and I settled on Boy Harsher’s “Pain,” an amazing, haunting song with lyrics that will reveal themselves to be relevant. I have to give thanks to the band for use of the lyrics, I contacted them and asked for permission and they were gracious enough to allow it. Music is going to be a big part of this comic, I want it to have a “soundtrack” of songs that inspired it or that I listened to while drawing to capture the mood, and I will list them as we go so that you can listen to them yourself.

I decided that instead of adding the lyrics digitally as an afterthought, as I did in the first version of the page, I wanted to incorporate them into the artwork itself so I hand lettered them:

In general I much prefer hand lettering that is a part of the artwork instead of something added afterwards. Coming up soon is a post about my process for hand lettering.

The final panel bottom of the page was fine in its original form, but only fine, and I felt like it could be better. Because I am so strongly influenced by movies I often think of my comic panels as storyboards and in my mind I can “see” the camera moves, but of course no one else can. In the original panel I had envisioned a slow zoom in to Otto at the bar, but in a static image it really feels a little flat and so I wanted to change the angle to something a little more dynamic for visual interest. I also added the inset of the cigarette being lit as a textural detail much like the insets higher up on the page, it felt more balanced.

The full page, raw inks: