Manic Pixel Dream Girl 1 drawings: second draft

I’m currently in the later stages of completing Manic Pixel Dream Girl 3, so it’s a nice time to look back at MPDG 1 and see how much my process has (or hasn’t) changed since then.

In this post I’ll talk about the second draft of drawings I did for MPDG 1. In case you don’t remember or you didn’t read it, you can find my post on the first draft here. And now, onward!

2-1

My “complete” second draft for MPDG 1 actually only goes as far as… ALMOST the end, but not quite what the end ended up being. So there are seven “frames,” the first of which is above. I’m really impressed with my own organization… Since this, I’ve gotten a lot LESS strict with myself about creating “official” drafts. There are good and bad things about that, and I actually want to write a post about that later this week, but for now I will stop being openly agog at my own former drafting abilities.

2-2

The image above is pretty close to how that part was in the final version. Only I originally envisioned my reaction as progressing horizontally, like it is in this draft. That’s kind of a pattern you’ll notice. I’m so used to reading comics in print that it’s easy to forget, in the draft stage, that I’m not drawing for print; I’m drawing for the internet, which means the mechanic by which readers read is scrolling, not page-turning. And as I think I’ve mentioned before, I try to model myself after amazing especially-for-the-internet comics like this one by Hallie Bateman and this one by Emily Carroll. (You should read that second one aaall the way through to see what I’m talking about!)

2-3

Again, the gallery of influential game ladies started out horizontal, and then I changed it to a staircase to fit the verticality of the medium. I do kind of wish that I could have allowed for the image of me looking at the gallery with my back to the reader, though. I like that (which I had in most early drafts) better than me walking down the stairs, but oh well.

To be fair, I probably would have liked the one of me walking down the stairs better if I had done a better job drawing myself walking down the stairs…

2-4

I was originally going to include a much wider range of my own childhood, time-wise, than I did in the final version of MPDG 1. Above I highlighted things about me that were symbols of my “uncool” social status; from left to right, the picture of me is aging from about 8 to about 14. In the end, to keep things clearer and simpler, I made the series more or less chronological, with minimal (and pretty straightforward) flashbacks (flashforwards? I don’t know.). Anyway, the first installment only covered from the age of 8 or so to 11.

It works (I think) that the kinds of things that single you out as being “different” when you’re a child tend to change as you grow up. So what alienated me from my peers at 8 wasn’t necessarily what did it by the time I was 14. Ditto for 18, 22, etc. Categorizing things the way I did above would have smoothed over some of those changes, so I’m glad I didn’t end up doing it that way.

For the record, the final series is organized like this: Part 1 is 2012 then flashback to ~1997-1999 (elementary school); Part 2 is 1999-2002 (middle school); Part 3 is 2012 then flashback to 2002-2006 (high school); and Part 4 will be 2006-nowish (college & after). So structurally, 1/3 and 2/4 are similar, but visually 2/3 and 1/4 are more similar. (Or will be, in the latter’s case.)

2-5

The “prim and perfect” other girls were always more or less how they are above. In the final comic, I added a contextual scene with a couple of them in a bedroom decorated how I imagined “normal” girls’ bedrooms were decorated back in the late nineties. I don’t think I actually ever went over to a “normal” girl’s house as a child (I had one or two close friends who were almost as weird as I was), so it’s all just conjecture, even now…

2-6

I have no idea what the above clearly-not-finished frame was supposed to be!

Oh wait I think I do. When I started writing MPDG (as a whole, not in parts), one of the incidents that stood out in my memory was this: The other girls were always talking about the Spice Girls, and my only exposure to them was when I heard them playing in a mall or a restaurant or whatever. I’m still kind of bewildered as to how the other girls even found out about the Spice Girls, or that liking them was the “right” thing to do as girls.

Anyway, I pretended I liked the Spice Girls, or at the very least that I knew who they were and what their music was like. Once I sat on the end of my bed (I’m pretty sure that’s what’s in the frame above) and wrote in one of those journals that was more of an activity book that a secret of mine was that I was “the Spice Girls’ biggest fan.” I had maybe ever heard like one of their songs maybe twice. It was insane! Why would I lie TO MYSELF to make myself seem girlier or more normal or whatever? But I did.

I struggled for a long time with how I would incorporate that anecdote into MPDG because I felt (and still feel) like it was emblematic of so much of how strong and internalized those young feelings of alienation can be, and were. Finally, I found a way to imply the story without beating the reader over the head with it, or telling it in a blow-by-blow style like I just did in the last couple paragraphs. Here’s what I ended up doing, and I’m really proud of it. I think the particular experience of translating that memory from rambling to subtle has been one of the most important lessons for me in storytelling, and how different comics are as a medium from straight text.

2-7

You’re probably tired of reading this by now, so it’s a good thing I’m at the last panel.

This is again mainly an example of something I ended up changing from primarily horizontal to primarily vertical. I also didn’t include the ending in this draft, which may be because I wasn’t sure what it was going to be yet? Or maybe I was SO sure I didn’t feel the need to storyboard it. I don’t remember.

Anyway, there it is! The second draft (and first FULL draft) of Manic Pixel Dream Girl, Part 1. Hope my lengthy explanations have been helpful rather than irritating and/or tl;dr. Till next time!

Kosher Salt 8: storyboards

I’ve been slacking on this blog ALREADY (I’m joking; I have had several concurrent deadlines so this current slacking is just a blip, not something that will eventually become permanent. NEVER FEAR!) and part of that was because I was working on my eighth installment of Kosher Salt.

This particular strip was fraught with difficulty throughout my writing/drawing process, but I actually touch on that in the comic itself (I know, meta, right?) so I won’t go into it here for now.

Instead, here is a picture of my Kosher Salt 8 (FINAL version, not the zillions of unused iterations) storyboard sketches:

8-1

As you can see, it’s pretty rough. But also pretty close to the final comic, in general terms.

More detailed posts soon, promise!