The Eunice Williams Story page 8

p8 detail

The next page in the story I’m drawing for Fulcrum Press‘ Colonial Comics anthology.

My “script” for the page:

PAGE 8

The Mohawk children have an easy life.  Running around and playing.  Eunice watches shyly as they play.  They call her over.  Then she is playing with them.  

Thumbnail:


p 8 thumbnail

As you can see I added in the element of Eunice’s Indian mother intervening on her behalf with the other kids.

 I also realized that the transition from the narrated/dialogue pages (John’s story) to the wordless pages (Eunice’s story), needed to be smoothed out with a line of narration.  Otherwise it seemed too abrupt.   The rough pencils:

Page 8 rough FLAT

The square format lets you do some fun things that wouldn’t be possible in a conventional rectangular page. Here I tried to play with the two diagonal axes of a page divided into four equal quarters.   So there’s the parallel/contrast between the lonely girl in the first panel and the playing children in the last, in the axis running top left-bottom right between two square panels.  And then the opposite, axis – top right to bottom left –  in which we “ride” a rough diagonal through the series looks from one character to the others:

Page 8 rough with axes


Does that make sense?

Final inks:

p8 sized
The line of narration, by the way, is invented, not from John’s book.  I don’t want to take cheap shots to exaggerate John’s anti-Indian attitude.  But he was quoted (I didn’t make a note of where, but probably in John Demos’ The Unredeemed Captive), referring to the Indians as “wretched.”  So I thought it fair enough to use the word here.Thanks!

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

* Copy This Password *

* Type Or Paste Password Here *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.