Hey remember when MitM updated each Thursday? Yeah, good times…

Well hopefully those times have returned! YAY!! 😀

College is behind me now (that’s still such a wierd sentence to say), so the majority of what was eating away at my comic time the most is done. Now I just need to find a job……yay.

As for today’s comic page, I can’t believe it! It’s here! The next day in the MitM world!! Seriously, everything up to this page occured on the same day, most of which was actually at night. That’s actually really sad that it took this long to progress forward……

I return!!!

Apologies for the long delay. A whole bunch of “senior” stuff came up in the last week along with other commitments. Apart from no time to actually get some work done on MitM, I was also at a small writer’s block on how to finish this page. Well I figured it out I suppose and I set aside some time to get her done.

For those of you who check out these comments, here’s a fun tid bit. I made a last minute adjustment in the 6th panel with Joel. In the rough sketch of the page he actually had a sad or kinda distant expression. I decided before inking the page to actually make it more fierce and determined. It wasn’t meant to make him look angry per se, but rather to show disagreement or disgust.

Up to this point it seemed that all Joel ever did was make sad faces 🙁
So I wanted to finally have him show some backbone on a subject 🙂

Another regularly scheduled delay! Sorry guys…

I actually pulled an all nighter Wednesday/Thursday to finish this page, but I couldn’t post it cause I never came home for the rest of the day till real late. >.< Oh gosh, this current scene though. It took forever for me to make up my mind on how to do it. I hope you enjoy it! ^^

Well, page 92, here it is.

Dialogue, once again, was changed right before I inked this page. I wasn’t satisfied for a while on the dialogue flow (not sure I’m entirely content, but it’s there).

Also funny story, I looked at the previous page (page 91) and compared it to this page side by side. I noticed that the layout/panel progression is almost identical, merely reversed! Small panel with little characters, close up that pops out of panel, duel close mug shots overplayed on long panel, large panel split in half between characters, and empty panel with no action. It ain’t exactly the same, but amusingly similar xD

HA!! I got this page up on time!!!! >:D

All I had to do was stay up super late and only get two hours of sleep before class!

……*dies* XP

Oops…a tad late this week…but hey look on the bright side, it just means you have less time to wait for the next page! (hopefully the next page will be done by Thursday)

My graphic design portfolio review was last week so that’s where all my time ran off to…

Anyways, as for commentary on the page itself, we finally got to the mysterious stranger’s name! 😀 Hey remember when I mentioned that “Joel and Janice were the first two characters I designed”? Well here he is. While Janice didn’t change extensively, Joel changed a lot as a character. His actual design may have hardly changed since the initial sketch, but his role in the story changed tremendously. Looking at my numerous scribbles and notes in my sketchbook, I’m pretty sure he’s the character that I tried to put the most thought into.

Sometimes when someone is being annoyingly melodramatic in a film/book/comic you just want to bonk ‘em on the head and tell them to “get over yourself.” See Joel for example…

Warning! BLOOD!!! O.O

Yup, stuff…

Maybe I should practice drawing blood. I’ve never drawn it before, so it was really weird. Also drawing the casted shadows of the guards was really strange to figure out.

By the way, I am really fond of this panel layout……

AGH! It’s done!!

It’s been a long week and after several extra hours this week’s page is done. Just over the course of this week, this page was rewritten at least thrice before landing on this version. I had a hard time deciding on what was actually gonna happen on this page.

I also had an unusually difficult time coming up with appropriate dialogue for this page, but I’m mostly content with the finished script. Just for those of you who actually read my comments, in the middle 4 panels there was actually a fourth word bubble right between the third and fourth panel (the only panels that do not have a word bubble anymore). It was one of the guards merely saying “Well first let’s find a new lantern.” Yeah. Kinda lame. That’s mostly why it was cut, that and I wanted a “silent” panel without a word bubble before the monk pops his head out the door. It wasn’t cut till halfway through inking the page, so it really was a last second decision to leave out.

Also after two pages using a really odd layout we’re back to a more static, normal layout. Well…kinda at least. I always strive to make each page unique or new in some way. For this page I was really interested in how the four middle, tall panels extend behind the other panels.

Yay! More action!!

Well, that new character didn’t last long. And we didn’t even get to know his name…

This page was really hard to layout since it was so radically different than most of my normal layouts. I really like how the action ends up flowing between each panel and how dynamic it feels though.

I always thought this was how a “daring escape” would honestly go in real life. You would do something really cool at first, everything would be going awesome, then you make like this epic heroic leap……and fall flat on your face…

P.S. I’ve been kinda waiting to use the sound effect “POW” for awhile now X3

Apologies for the late updates recently…

This page took a little more time than first anticipated. Can you guess why? >.< I really love trying out new ideas with different pages, and this is a layout concept that had been floating around in my brain for a while now. Taking one giant image and placing all the panels on top of it, rather than my traditional white, negative space. Setting aside the huge amount of extra work this requires, I think it's a cool idea. Personally I think it would work better if the other panels had simpler backgrounds or nothing at all like the top four panels shown here. Also some of the shading got a little loose towards the end of this page since I was so tired, but I hope it's still decent enough.