Here's a panel from page 16 of Symphony Number Six. I'm extremely pleased with how the page turned out, and I debated posting the entire thing here - but I think it would give away too much about the story, and I want you all to be surprised. My friend Paul Guinan recently suggested something interesting to me: while 90s darling Rob Liefeld is now roundly mocked by basically everybody for his totally bogus drawings, Frank Miller, perhaps guilty of much of the same erroneous anatomical construction, is still praised sycophantically. (I would agree with Paul's assessment of Miller's draftsmanship - it's particularly noticeable on his women characters). The difference, according to Paul, is that Liefeld made his own errors more visible by filling them up with flashy crosshatching, while Miller covers his up with atmospheric pools of black. "But one thing Miller has going for him," Paul conceded, "is a great sense of design."
And this sense of design, I'm learning, covers a multitude of sins. My rendering on these last few pages of SN6 is as loose as it's been since I first started cartooning again about four years ago. But as long as I'm confident that I've:
- Laid out the panels, and the elements within each panel, in a narratively sound way that conveys the action of the story and the mental or emotional states of the characters, and is also attractive.
- Penciled the elements in the panel with some solidity and structural accuracy, and gotten the facial expressions right.
