An update on how my Grug the Destroyer comic is coming along. I am now at the mid point of the story, where my characters have been established and I'm now just fleshing out how they interact with one another. I've built up my drawing ability quite a bit since starting and now feel a lot more comfortable to draw multiple characters in one frame, which means that the dialog between the armour pieces is reduced somewhat.
In part 2 I began experimenting with frames that sit on top of the main page and in part 3 I continued this, taking it further. Though part 3 was rushed it does get across this idea that the girl is there to help Grug, and that she fights in a way that the armour set didn't teach. In the original drawings the girls face in the last panel is a more uncertain look, showing she wants to be with Grug but she doesn't agree with what they're doing.
I had however neglected the backgrounds quite a lot when doing part 3, so when it came to part 4 I intended to rectify this. I set the story up more like a stage show, with a constant backdrop that was pleasant to draw. Part of what I like so much now about doing comics is the visual language you can tap into, for instance in part 4 the girl makes love to Grug, in order to get the romantic idea across I set it on a moonlit lake bank.
I got some very good feedback regarding page 2 of part 3, Martin Barrett said that I should stop doing these crooked all over the place frames, as they weren't necessary and were detracting from the images. In page 3 and 4 I rubbed these lines out and made use of the objects, frames and speech bubbles to separate the panels. The image is no harder to read and in fact looks much better. A few little visual language things that I really liked were using a log for Grug's pillow, to get across the idea that his head is hard (which is another way of saying he's stupid) and also having the girl run into the negative space towards the To Be Continued... box. Hopefully prompting the audience to wander what's going to happen to her if she runs into the nothingness. Using this 1 or 2 drawings per page PLUS boxes on top looks a lot neater than my split the page into 4-6 irregular sized panels.
