The latest Mania, #77 October 2007, is out now.

This time I thought I'd feature a different page from the story - this is page 3. The gag grew through a number of drafts and it still works as a 2 pager without the last two pages.

The 4 page version has a good ending but left room for me to play around with the middle of the story. For that reason, I could really space the panelling out on this page, even to having room to draw Moth and Tanuki whole and letting the backgrounds drop away to become backdrops. The dialogue reveals some of the dynamics of Moth and Tanuki's supportive codependency (something usually lost in the rush of the story). My major reservation was having large areas of flat colour - even though I matched it a bit on the facing page - but the pages came out really nicely in print.

My main principle with M&T is no rules. If the story needs to work a particular way, visually or narratively, that's where I want to go with it. However, while this one is a downbeat story, it came out so well visually that it may influence how I do similarly paced future tales.

Labels: Mania, Moth and Tanuki