Chapter 5: Page 1

Land of Confusion: Page 1

NOTES FROM RANDY

Welcome back!

If only I had the vaguest idea of what day Tuesday actually is, we wouldn’t be having this one-sided conversation on a Wednesday. Yeah, that’s on me.

But here’s the thing, is it really so bad? So like last chapter, I think I need to move my day to Wednesdays, mostly because it fits my schedule better.

Okay, back to the first page. Chapter 5 is FINALLY here. We had a bit of a break in between that probably seemed longer for you all than it did for me. I spent a lot of that time working on a fantasy comic of my own creation, and trying to plot out the art for this chapter of The Jacket. Jason briefly mentioned the process for the Chapter 5 cover art, which took quite a few turns. I’ll get to that in a minute.

As for this page, we aren’t trying to leave you hanging on what is happening with Harker. This page ended up being one of my favorite pages from the series so far. Jason and I decided early on that it would be silent. Even though I think the lack of “BEEP” sound effects doesn’t do the typical hospital room scene justice, this is no typical hospital scene. The way Jason wrote it, I saw it in my head as a scene from a movie. The slow pull back of the camera, fading in from the black of the monitor background, just silence as the line traces across the screen to the silhouette of the president standing watch…

So that cover process. Yeah, that was a WHOLE thing. When we devise our covers, they usually start as just ideas of our’s thrown back and forth. Well, mostly it is me throwing ideas at Jason, who already has the better idea for a cover in his head. So then I take his idea(s) and process it a few ways.

First, I shoehorn my ideas into his idea and try to make it work. Then Jason makes sure I know to stop doing that, and we move on to the actual good ideas. The main plan always had the old man and the three main characters in peril. Jason and I couldn’t decide on a background. Originally, Jason was pushing for the old man’s coat to come all the way down, but I felt that I couldn’t make it work without “boxing” in the characters or the sides of the cover. It just didn’t feel right.

After some trial and error, we talked about adding the symbols as patches on the old man’s coat. Turns out, I suck are drawing that, so the symbols became more…ethereal instead. The tree branches…well that’s just my way of hinting at something later. And the word-like symbols straight down under my name and the pound symbol? That is Hylian text from The Legend of Zelda spelling out “APOTHEOSIS.” :-D

Jason is back with Page 2 tomorrow, and I’ll see you again next Wednesday!

-Randy