Grinding It Out

And Then One Day #9: Page 2 (Elephant Eater): Panel 1: There are three items which catch my eye here. The first is Ryan’s continued dedication to detail in the backgrounds. So often, we find small press creators cheating their audiences and offering skimpy backgrounds as they rush through a page to meet a deadline or simply avoid the work. It’s not the case with Elephant Eater Comics. I love these acts of visual world-building; you can sense the campus extending beyond the borders of the panel based on the partial building, fountain, and students walking off panel, which seems to push the dimensions of the environment further out horizontally. I also like the gesture Ryan uses as he reaches into his backpack; it’s another solid effort at realism in the human form. The last bit that I find really engaging is the zig-zag lightning bolt effect that Ryan uses for his speech balloon. There’s a sharpness to it that’s unique visually, but also serves as a nice bit of linguistic punctuation.

Panel 2: This is a nice zoom-in onto a detail of the previous image that alters the POV slightly and adjusts the camera angle to a more eye-level plane. As they dive into conversation, we’re pulled in closer as well.

Panel 3: Ryan has been experimenting with this patterned background technique for a while now and although at first it seems pretty simple, it’s proven fairly versatile. Here, what I take from it is almost an insinuation of Ryan thinking, searching for his words to recall a memory, seeing the passage he’s referring to in his mind’s eye. It’s fairly benign, but unfortunately “arguement” is a common misspelling of “argument.” It’s something I’m sure Ryan will correct before this issue sees print.

Panel 4: I like something about this panel, but it’s more of a technical construction choice. There’s a relatively large amount of text in this panel, so Ryan makes a design selection here that results in a long horizontal panel to house the verbiage. Honestly, it’s something that I probably wouldn’t notice in a reading of the entire issue, but taken here a page at a time, I’m able to slow down and really take in the nuances of the panel layouts, what’s contained within them, and ask the “why” question more often. I like that!