Battle for Summer Comic

My finals for my character design class and my digital painting class overlapped, so I decided to base the comic I'd make for digital painting on the pitch bible I made for character design. Killing two birds with one stone as I wouldn't have to create a new world for my comic.

For the comic, I wanted to emulate the final chapter in a fight reminiscent of manga for Shonen Jump.

The main combatants are tired and only have one more attack left in the tank. The people on the sidelines are either saying it's too dangerous to keep fighting or egging the fighters on. Both combatants take a big pose... and ACTION ACTION ACTION and then... BAM! A big splash page where someone is being knocked out. Only, being short on time I wasn't able to finish inking the final 5 pages. If you squint you can kind of make it out though.

For this project, I wanted to experiment with making strong poses and pages with only a few panels like I'd seen in works like Gachiakuta:

I also was hoping to reach the satisfying heights of works like One Piece in the final page spread. Where someone getting knocked up takes up 1 and 1/2 pages, and the last half is used for small panels that show the reactions of the attacker, the person being knocked out, and anyone on the sidelines:

Other than being unable to finish those final 5 pages, a big thing I want to improve on in later projects is clarity. I thought that a lot of my panels were clear when I thumbnailed them out but only when I had to hand in my work and slow down to look back did I realize that my visual language was lacking.

The three factors I think made this so is:

1. I was on a time crunch so I didn't have much time to reflect and when I did, I didn't have time to fix it.

2. I didn't recognize that as a stand-alone project, I hadn't built a visual dictionary with my audience as normal comics do. So certain poses and angles were foreign to the audience as they haven't been introduced to these visual concepts. In particular, I think the comic fails to communicate that the dread head is emanating power through the water and that afterwards he shoots himself across the water at top speed.

3. I held myself back from having more pages to allow for slowing things down and letting actions breathe. I was so concerned with getting the project out that I hard-capped at 13 pages when stories like these typically need 18-22. In hindsight, it would've been better to make a project that fit the timeline rather than force a project to fit.

I say this for a lot of my projects, but I do hope one day to give this one another go.