The first round of designs just didn't feel right to me. So I decided to take another stab at them. This time I paid special attention to the silhouettes of the characters, and trying to distinguish them by height and width. I felt a lot more confident about these designs. Due to the variation, these characters feel a lot more specific.
Process
The first round of designs I made for Net of Good & Evil, I focused on the clothing they would be wearing. I wanted these characters to feel at home in a farm scene in the mid to late 1800s. However, I didn't pay much attention to the silhouettes of the characters.
Version 1
Overall, I was pretty happy with my first round of sketches. There was a lot I had to work on, and a bunch of stuff that was a bit confusing to read. But there was also a lot of good stuff that I ended up keeping. In general, I was trying to break the margins a lot. Sometimes there was an actual reason, sometimes it was just because I thought it would look cool. A lot of times it was simply because I was running out of space on the page. I really didn’t want this comic to be longer than 30 pages. I tried to strike a balance between squeezing as much into each page as possible, while still pacing out the story well. Due to this, a lot of the revision process was cutting out unnecessary panels, and only breaking the margins when it would have the most effect.
Fight Scene Iterations
This specific spread took me so long to get right. I've always been a big fan of shonen action/adventure manga. These stories tend to be about fighting, and as such the fight scenes are drawn to look really cool. Due to this, I unconsciously approached this fight scene in a similar way. I was trying to make it look "cool".
The only problem with this approach is that it feels very tonally out of place with a story like "East of Eden". There's nothing "cool" or "epic" about this fight. I think even calling it a fight in the first place is a stretch. It is definitively a brutal, one-sided beatdown. Throughout my next iterations, I tried to figure out how to show the brutality of the fight, without relying on exaggerated movement or proportions, which tended to lighten the mood of the scene.
