Laying Out the Pages

After I received the complete story the first thing I did was laid out the entire comic in thumbnails. Same size I did the layout for the cover art. This way you can see all your layouts side by side. See if you have too many of one layout, if you need to change a page or two so it doesn't get redundant for the reader. Here are the sketches I did for the layouts.

I don't want to give away much of the story, so you can't make them bigger, but this is the general layout of the comic all in all.

I did these simply with pencil and pen. I wouldn't suggest using a good pen, seeing as how I ran out of ink and these are just for me to look at - kind of upsetting. Here is a close up of one of the panels. It's an action scene and wasn't that strong when I first laid it out.

After I looked through the comic I found panels like this and drew them on an 8.5" by 11" to see if I could spruce it up a bit. This is what I came up with.

Now that I drew it on a larger scale I can see that I need to fix the middle panel a lot, make him quite a bit bigger, and I can also see that if I even the bottom two panels out more it could help with the general aesthetics of the page. I went back on my smaller layout and fixed it in pen, which I had drawn in pencil.

After laying out all the pages I can now redraw some of them so that they won't be so consistent in design. That way the reader gets a little more variety of layouts. Due to the fact that this comic is new I also tried to stay away from anything too extreme so there would be no question on losing the reader in some spots. After we establish a fan base and story then we can get some cool layouts drawn like in the work of Ed McGuinness. 

(By the way) I draw the initial sketches with a blue col-erase pencil, also known as a non-photo pencil, so that it just won't show up when I scan it in as an illustration. Or I can just drop all the blue levels and threshold the image to make it all black and white.