Page 1: In the last page of the last issue, you get your first glimps of the submarines. The problem was that I drew them sitting ON the water instead of IN the water–a mistake I corrected in issue 3. And because the cannons on the sub had to fire straight into the air, the subs ended up doing a LOT of pitching and rolling.
Page 2-3: I like using large, sweeping panels next to small, floating panels. This page is a good example of it.
Page 5: Grant insisted on having crystals power the submarine. I don’t know what their meaning in the story is (or if there’s a real-life counter part to them), but up through issue 5 there’s no mention of it. Sometimes I end up design things that don’t play any role, and sometimes there is a point. I feel like Grant is writing to suprise the development team as well as the readers.
Page 6: The monster was a breeze to draw. Just a bunch of scribbles, patterns, scratches and fingerprints.
Page 8: This might be my favorite page of the entire series so far. And Dave NAILED the colors. He even found all the chipped stucco on the walls.
Page 9: The lead pirate’s shirt goes from horizontal stripes to vertical ones. And it’s totally my mistake. There’s been so much design work to keep track of that sometimes the littlest things end up slipping through.
Page 11: Water is fun because sometimes it has form, but when it’s calm then it essentially becomes a mirror. ”Flipping” the details in panel 1 was a lot of fun.
Page 12: I didn’t know how Dave was going to handle the mosaic. His solution? Render every goddamned one of them. And what a great job he did! He even added a few to the purple that I wasn’t planning on. Dave, you rock.
Page 13: The loosest page of the series so far. Maybe a little too loose in certain details.
Page 15: I insisted that the water and sky be blended. Usually the colorist will color the water blue, and the sky something else–in other words create a line with color even though the artist didn’t draw one. It sounds small but it’s one of my pet peeves.
Page 16-17: So man goddamned pirates. I was having pirate nightmares after this spread. Although 2 things strike me as very funny about this scene. The first: Smoot really defines that expression “beat you like a red headed step child”. He was abopted, his dad hates him–did I step on the joke yet? And second: this comic was released on St. Patrick’s Day. So now these red-headed pirates look more like leprechauns. And it doesn’t help that they’re getting tossed.
Page 19: If Dave called me and told me about his idea to color the rocks purple, the grass orange and the water green, then I would have laughed in his face. But somehow he pulled it off! My reaction to this scene was like this “ARGH!!! What the hell did he–actually that looks really good now that I think about it”. Dave Stewart: making us love things that we thought we’d hate.
Page 22: When I first finished this page I thought I’d dropped the ball. It’s just so…BLAH in the black and white stage. But then Dave saved it.