for love and light

You can skip my commentary and go right to the full comic here.

This is the page that begins Raven’s monologue and I had this written pretty much during the scene in Strawberry Memory where Raven and Wren are at the bar. I couldn’t use it then — it was too long and it would have completely derailed the story, but I thought it would be suited better as sort of a middle of the night thing to say when it’s more OK to be completely honest. Unfortunately it’s not that exciting — I thought it would be best for Raven to never face Wren during the dialogue so she always keeps her back to her.

You can skip my commentary and go right to the full comic here.

Panels 2 and 4 look like copy and paste panels but they aren’t. The neat thing about going digital is I can use my inked work as a pencil layer and get panels looking relatively the same. I do think copy and paste is not good — the eye can detect it and at times can slip the reader out of the moment. By drawing the panel again it looks different enough so that it feels like a still camera yet it doesn’t have that feeling like it’s exactly the same, like we’re looking at a still subject rather than a photograph of a still subject. I did a lot of copy and paste with my earlier comics, but since starting depcom I have been trying not to do any at all.

What I have tried to capture here is the annoyance of trying to sleep in a bed with someone else in it, especially when you’re not a couple and your tolerance for things is lower. The conversation about nakedness is based on a naive belief I had as a kid that adults sleep naked because they are adults, not because of, er, anything else. Now I’m like Wren. Washing sheets is a pain in the ass.

Raven’s mom has appeared in depression comix #362 and it was interesting for me to sort out her family life in the comic. Although I had written the original script with no mention of Raven’s mom at all it’s been clear to me that the role the mom plays in this scene is actually vitally important. I didn’t realize it when Raven made the offhand comment about “boyfriends” on the first page, but it made me realize that Raven’s dad is no longer in the picture and Raven’s mom is leading a life that is really stressing out Raven. I believe that when we develop characters we give them lives subconsciously and we deke them out through the creative process.

You can skip my commentary and go right to the comic here.

When I was working on Strawberry Memory, there was a lot of dialogue I was constantly making and throwing away, lots of subplots I had in my head but eventually had to toss off to keep the story going straight towards the destination I had planned. When Raven starts talking on pages 17 to 18 there was a LOT more dialogue there but I recognized that instead of going towards yet another direction I needed to cut it. But I knew Raven had a story I wanted to tell and eventually it became Later That Night. I hope you read it and like it. It’s a little different in how I approached drawing it, it’s 9 panels a page and has a layer of colour on it. I wanted to get the feeling of darkness and it seemed a simple way of doing it.