The Chux Wagon

Thanks for writing something up! 

It’s interesting that you mention that I had redundant descriptions, because in the comic she describes each character as young, then says that she feels old now too. She tends to have redundant narration - it’s honestly a conscious effort for that kind of repetition and style.

I was definitely working against a deficit since I was cutting up art made for something else into a written scene, which isn’t ideal and isn’t what I would want from a ‘final’ result either. There are ideas to try and meld the art into the prose more - like even using key moments/dialogue into a comic panel. I’m not too sure how well that would work though. 

Maybe there isn’t a smooth way of mixing in panels into the writing - like you said, it’s hard to switch between paying attention to art and then the writing and back again. There could be a way of doing like, full page shots with art with lots of empty area to fill with the prose (which sounds really interesting), but that has the potential of running me back into taking way too long with the art and not enough room for prose and I’m back with the same problem.

unicornorgy:

chuxwagon:

Scene Experiment! 

Trying something new with Brightest, and would appreciate feedback. Re-writing the last scene for prose and using art assets already drawn for the scene. 

http://www.brightestcomic.com

Hm hm. One of the things I like about your comics is how much you say with so little. Your writing is less eloquent to me, because parts of it are redundant. For example, you call attention to the other people’s youth many times. You don’t need to write, then, “And suddenly I’m really conscious of how old I am” because you already told us.

Perhaps it’s because ‘show don’t tell’ takes SO much work in comics (esp. with how much complexity you bring to that…moods, relationships, pauses, not just action) that if you’re gonna use prose, I expect the same level of quality/effort from it that I can see in your comic.

Also, the minute I start reading, I form mental images of the characters and the place. Your style doesn’t lend itself well to flipping from mental image to real image because it is very cartoony and very strongly its own thing, and unfortunately I found myself ignoring the images completely as I read. Then later when I looked at them, it was hard to relate them to the words. Perhaps because they were so explicitly connected?

I hate being such a downer :(

There’s gotta be a way to do this well…Have you read anything like it? Paul Madonna’s All Over Coffee comes to mind as a cool way to integrate text and images. The two play off each other in a clever non-literal way.

Actually, now that I think about it, children’s books are often pretty clever about this sort of thing. And you gotta get a good library going for when your kid is old enough, right?