Dragon Press Graphics - Nikki O'Shea - First Comic Experiment

As The Umbra Turns

Comic Book:

Here I will be putting the old and new pages side by side for comparison. What you see here are just thumbnails. If you click on the thumbnails, you can see a closeup of each page seperately. Some of the later NEW Pages are ONLY thumbnails (as you will be able to see by the fact that they are just lineart and have no text), but eventually I do plan on having them 'toned' or 'colored' in.

The old comic was only 7 pages long, but when I redrew the comic, it became 9 pages long. I kept as much of the old ideas as possible (because I felt that the ideas weren't BAD ideas, just badly done), just improving on the actual drawing and pacing and layout. So sometimes, the pages WILL be a bit out of synch...

The old comics, I would just want you to keep one thing in mind. What you are viewing here is an end result. It is the scan, of a photocopy, of a printing off a College Mac, of the scan of the actual original. And keeping that in mind....its STILL pretty horrible.

Old pages on the left, New pages on the right.

The cover:

The old one shows just the front page (the back page was an advertisement for someone else's comic) while the new one shows you the entire cover. The left side of the image will become the back, while the right side of the image will become the front.

Old Page 1 = New Page 1 and 2:

The scene was designed allright, but for the flow of the text. The flow was wrong, and there was too much of it. By reversing the image and creating almost another entire second page for the text, it was broken up a little more and flowed better...

Old Page 2 and 3 = New page 2 (above) and 3:

The top panel of the old comic page 2 is actually the BOTTOM panel of the new comic page 2 (seen above). The bottom panel of Old comic page 2 THEN becomes the New comic page 3 top panel, while 3/4's of the overly crowded Old Comic Page 3 finishes off the rest of NEW comic page 3. See what I meant about the new flow of the layout making the pages get out of synch with each other?

I'm quite impressed with how I've done Scottys transformation sequence in this one (and still kept the spirit of the other) and how I've DEFINITLY improved Tatsuo's going into the umbra sequence (see Old page 4 and new page 4).

Old Page 4 = New Page 4 and 5:

Now, the last 1/4 of the Old Page 3 and the first 1/4 of the Old page 4 combine to become the New Page 4 (are we back in synch yet? Not quite...), and the remainder of Old Page 4 becomes 95% of the New Page 5

Old Page 5 = New Page 6

I can't believe it - I think we're just about back in synch! The end of Old Page 5 and New Page 6 are the same ending!

Old Page 6 = New Page 7

When redrawing this page, I eliminated the mouth yawn scene as well as the background scene under the three face panels (which made this look a bit better, and run a little smoother). The very last panel was also cut from Page 7 and added into page 8 (below in the next section)

The Finale: Old Page 7 = New Pages 8 & 9

Old Page 7 (the FINAL page) was definitly overcrowded and needed to be broken up VERY badly. So that one page became 2 pages. The NEW final page (page 9) I actually had to try drawing several times before I got something I liked. I apparantly can't draw monsters very well...as I got ALOT of teasing on this...

I also think that the overall flow of the comic has Improved tremendously and I'm quite proud of this effort.