Feeedback

Last week I got my first editorial feedback on the two rough strips I have sent to the publisher - my first feedback as a (sort of) professional comic creator! Ooh! The verdict: 'you have to do these again'.

Ok, so it wasn't as bad as all that - they liked the script (yay!), and they liked the drawings (woo!), but (and I know I am pretty much always guilty of doing this on Beaver and Steve) in some of the panels I had so much text that it squashed up the pictures, and that has to change.

They don't want me to remove any of the dialogue (I know I have a tendency to be a little verbose in my scripting, which is what usually causes this problem, but they seem to like it) so I need to figure out a way of rebalancing things - maybe making some panels smaller to allow others more room, or spreading the story out over more episodes so I don't have to cram as much in per panel. But however I deal with it I am going to have to face my greatest fear: redoing work that I have already finished.

I hate hate hate going back to something that I thought was finished and redoing it from scratch, but I just don't know if there's any way I can salvage the work I've already done (two weeks of work) - perhaps I can reuse a couple of panels, but I think most of it will have to be completely redrawn. Oh fiddlesticks. Of course a lot of this pain could have been saved if I'd, you know, actually planned the layout of the comics in advance, but really, who's going to do a thing like that?

Oh well, back to (quite literally) the drawing board...

P.S yesterday I became 30. THIRTY. As if I do not have enough problems already.