Footprints: Bad Luck Charm Page Process (Page 4)

We’re only a few days from the end of the Footprints: Bad Luck Charm Kickstarter, so I’ll be posting the remainder of these behind-the-scenes pieces this week! We’ve looked at Page 1, 2, and 3, so onto Page 4!

Jonathan more or less rendered this page as I wrote it aside from two notable changes: he added a panel that helps build the suspense of the gambling and he chose a different angle for that last panel, which definitely works better (and is less complicated) than what I wrote. But the thing I love about this page is something that you can’t see from comparing the script to the final art — you’d have to be privy to our emails back and forth to have any idea about it.

‘Resa’s line in the last panel, “Cash in your winnings and never come back” is a nod to one of the greatest movies of all-time, Casablanca. But it wasn ‘t written in the original script that way; it was originally just “Oh, Devil…” as she tried to grab his attention.

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Footprints: Bad Luck Charm Page Process (Page 3)

Since we’ve looked at pages 1 and 2 so far, I figured we might as well go the rest of the way and check out the remaining four pages of the Footprints: Bad Luck Charm story. Whereas Page 2 takes a lot of liberties from the script in terms of what Jonathan did with the art, Page 3 is a great example of how Adam’s lettering really helped the flow of the story in a significant way.

You’ll notice that Adam shifts the balloons around a bit, most notably Devil and ‘Resa’s lines as scripted in 3.2 to 3.1 and Devil’s line as scripted in 3.6 to 3.5. While the moves might have been related to space issues within the panels, they both help punctuate particular moments that would’ve been lost under dialogue otherwise.

Footprints: Bad Luck Charm Page Process (Page 2)

Last time around we looked at Page 1 of Footprints: Bad Luck Charm, in which Jonathan followed my script exactly. Page 2 has significant changes, and I think goes to show how much a good artist and storyteller can help improve whatever you’re trying to do with the story.

So often, as a writer, you’re lost in the script and the dialogue and trying to think so visually that you’re neglecting the core of the scene and what it’s about. That was the case in my script for page 2, I think, where I was doing more to establish the setting than I was the characters (see below).