There’s art I should be working on, there’s cleaning I should be doing, but I think right now what I’m going to do is sit down with my iPad and a cbz of the entirety of Decrypting Rita so far. I’ve been looking at the next page in progress and can’t get going on it for the past couple of days. I’m not sure if this means I’m just tired and can’t really focus on anything, or that there is something wrong with the page – sometimes my inner critic will make it known that This Page Is Not Ready Yet, and I just can’t make myself finish the drawing until I fix whatever’s wrong with the narrative.
I figure that reading the whole thing will give me ideas. And help swap it all back into my head; I’ve been away from it longer than I’d like.
(and to be honest I kinda know where the trouble spot is, I really think I just need to refine two dialogue balloons in the middle of the page. But I want to read the whole thing and see just what my brain says needs to happen when I get there.)
There are times I really wish I could treat this like I treated chapter one of Absinthe and skip around when I’m a little stuck on one page. But the multiple-narratives nature of this beast means that I really just have to take it one page at a time, as the overall timing of stuff is really, really based on exactly how things play out when I sketch out the pages. And some important ideas seem to only occur to me as I’m actually doing that – R1 getting stuck in Megaera’s head as a passenger, instead of simply taking over R4 to save her, for instance, happened entirely due to a sudden whim while I was putting together the page where it happens.
I don’t know if someone who was better at Writing Comic Books could actually put together a usable script for this beforehand. I’m the one telling this story, and this is the only way I’ve figured out how to tell it, so I have to wrestle with it sometimes. At best sometimes I have like three pages roughly scripted at any point in time! I have looser plans for the whole thing; I pretty much know what’s going to happen in the rest of Book 2 and 3. But the details… those don’t seem to come until I’m hip-deep in a section of the story.
Also my next couple of comics are probably going to be told VERY NORMALLY because holy shit doing this kind of trick on an extended basis is a lot of work. I’ve definitely learnt a lot about page layout and how to write a story on this project, and I’ll certainly be deploying the parallel narratives trick again in future stuff, but I won’t be building the whole thing around it!
(Tangentially, if you’re hungry for other stories that do this, I’d suggest picking up Matt Kindt’s “Mind Mgmt” – he mostly tells the story straight ahead, but there’s all these… things… in the margins that contribute to the overall gestalt.)