I took another look at the panels that I put together and I will be deleting a lot of the moments in the panel, first to go is the crime scene. It’s not needed.
The dialogue is also really bad. I can do a lot better, but have not hashed it out yet. I am realizing how much less dialogue is needed for a graphic novel then for a screenplay or stage play. Both, a screenplay and stage play, rely heavily on the auditory experience.
I’m finding with a graphic novel, the visual is key and works best in conjunction with the visceral relationship between each of the moments in a panel. The text really needs to be exact and precise, completely adding to the moment and the overall panel. Especially for a story like this one that is about the action and plot.
My mentor has been really pushing me to sketch out the panels and I am starting to understand the reasoning for it. It’s like video editing, every moment tells it’s own story but when you string them together a whole new meaning can be developed or it is realized that because of the visceral experience less is needed to tell the story. It’s why a cut in a movie or the jumping of images in graphic novel work. That instinctive understanding by the viewer who fills in all the gaps.
I think this semester I’m going to go back and reread Walter Murch’s book, “In a Blink of an Eye.” I really enjoy this book because it tries to answer the most basic and most important question a person working with images to tell a story needs to ask, “Why does a cut work?”
I feel this would help with a graphic novel because when it comes to the understanding and meaning of images strung together to create the wanted story, an important question to ask is, “why these two images next to each other not work to tell this story?”
So little time, so much work to do, but I’m looking forward to working on this again for this semester.