Author notes

065 - Killer Instinct

El Cid

on April 18, 2016

Hey wait what? But how did? Huh?!!

If you find yourself scratching your head wondering what happened in those first two panels, do not be alarmed. You've just witnessed a crime. A layout crime.

Dun dun dun.



That first panel looks all cool and stuff, Cid, but what the hell are they crashing into?

So good of you to ask, Cid. In the first panel, Nina is plowing Kai through one of the big chandeliers overhead. You can see the chandeliers are there on some previous pages, and you can see the glowing debris falling in the background of panel 2. It's confusing because originally the storyboard called for four panels rather than three, and the first panel would have shown them flying towards the chandelier. What ended up being the first panel on this page was actually meant to be the second. The action sequence would have made a lot more sense that way.



Unfortunately, things didn't go according to plan. One thing I like to do on pages like this, where there's a big “splash” panel and a bunch of less interesting supporting panels, is do the splash panel first. That usually gets me pumped to do the supporting panels, and while I'm working on them I have more than just a blank page to look at. The problem is, by the time I'd put together the final panel, it took up a lot more of the page than it should have, and I no longer had room for three additional panels. So one panel had to go.

And that's how we ended up with this mess. It still makes some sequential sense, but it's just not as clear as it should have been. So the lesson learned: Don't bother planning if you're not going to stick to the plan!

Enjoy your Monday. Every nook and cranny of it.