Scripted!

To begin, I had to share this hysterical/wonderful alternate book cover. Anyone who didn't know anything about the book would assume Patrick Smith was a romance novelist. I actually wish I had this as a huge poster to put in my studio to pull some inspiration from, but I suppose this blog will do for now.

Speaking of covers, above is the cover of the young reader's adaptation. When I first spoke with Pineapple Press about the graphic novel adaptation we discussed the possibility of adapting from this version, which cuts out a lot of the more adult material (chief among them, the love triangle between Zech, Glenda and Tawanda). In the end, I felt going straight to the original source material was the best choice. I definitely want to make it available for younger fans, but I also wanted to draw in the interest of the older fans. 

And below, you'll see an image of how the finished illustration looks and how it is constructed from the script above. 

The first step in creating a graphic novel is to work on a script. Comics are written in a format that enables the artist to visualize the story through separating dialogue from action, so that the imagery of the panels can be discerned separately. Above is a snapshot of a portion of the script for The Vampirate of Matanzas Inlet. As you'll see, it's set up similar to a movie script. When I wrote The Vampirate of Matanzas Inlet, I developed it straight into this format, so what you're seeing is the infant stage of the graphic novel. 

In the case of A Land Remembered, Patrick Smith saved us the trouble of having to develop a script. Instead, we'll take it straight from the book. The only difference this time around, all I needed to do was cipher through the novel and find the key elements and scenes that would best translate into a comic. I re-organized the story into an outline that would allow me to break each chapter down. Above is the first few chapters (there are 24 in total...so far). 

Next week, I'll discuss reference photos and imagery, and how important it is to know your history BEFORE drawing an image of a person, place or thing in a comic.