Grug parts 5 and 6

The final 2 chapters of Grug the Destroyer bring the story to a close and allowed me to try out some techniques I hadn't been confident enough to do before.

In part 5 I took the idea of the girl (now grown old) narrating over the top of an action scene, and applied it to Grugson's training which was all about movement, so I tried some panels were the character ran through a scene that was split up (running across the log and jumping down) and looked into motion lines. I also paid closer attention to the verbal language of comics so that I could depict the now elderly girl being ill, it turns out that in comics characters "KOFF" rather than cough. In part 5 I didn't use any arbitrary lines running across the page, instead sticking to 1 or 2 drawings with panels inside that depicted other actions, which makes it look a lot more interesting as it's like there's layers of information for the reader to look over rather than a flat 1, 2, 3, 4 way of teling the story. Another little visual language thing I liked about part 5 was when the girl dies her speech bubble trails off instead of being closed, to represent her last breath fading away.

For part 6 I attempted something I had previously not been confident enough to do, and that's blacking large sections of the comic out. It worked well with the grimmer nature of the stories end, as Grugson confronts the transformed all powerful and now completely evil Grug. I allowed myself for the first time to use a brush to ink rather than my dip ink pen, which meant I got solid fill rather than cross hatching. I think this worked really well, and after Grug turns the evil armour on itself and it loses its malevolent power the darkness shrinks back, showing how the world the characters inhabit is opening up from the oppression and depression it had been under.

I also really enjoyed looking at the difference in drawing ability from the first couple issues of Grug compared to the last one, in order to capitalise on this and bring the story around full circle I redrew panels from the first and 2nd issue, namely the drawing of the girl holding her hand up to protect herself and also I drew the transformed Grug in the same pose. At this point in the story Grug realises that he is about to watch his son be killed and manages to wrestle control from the armour. I wanted to create a sense of flash back so I literally reused the poses and drawings to put the same idea in the audiences' mind.

The final page of Grug the Destroyer shows a dawn rising at the coast, whilst a girl with a baby peer out from behind a rock, to show that the world is beginning anew and that it is safe for the vulnerable. I also kept in mind though that I could pick the story back up later by saying that the girl with her baby in fact was not peering out wondering if the world is safe now, but rather she is the only person to see what happened to the evil armour, and perhaps her son will become the next Destroyer.

I really enjoyed trying to tell a story across a 28 page format, doing 4 pages per month (8 for the last one) really allowed me to absorb criticism and advice and search for better ways of doing things. Most of my projects are left alone after a months work, but to go back each month meant I could really track the progression I made. I will continue to make comics, I made a lot of little baby steps with Grug but I look forward to beginning my next story higher up the ladder.