THE MARK IN AMERICA, ISSUE #3, PAGE 10

For issue #3, I’ll be posting my rough layouts along with each page. Since the writer, Mike Barr, and I were working “Marvel Style” (in that he gave me a fairly fleshed out plot outline as opposed to a finished script, writing the dialogue and captions to my penciled pages) I suggested possible dialogue to go along with my staging, anticipating that Mike, or the editor, Bob Schreck, would ask for changes in my layouts before I went into the tight pencils.

If I’m inking myself, I can approach the roughs to pencils to finished inks in different ways, as it pertains to when in the process I figure out the shadows. In the case of this page I seemed to have figure the out in the rough stage, as it the shadows were an important part of the storytelling. Of course, the question is, when is that NOT the case? Especially since putting in more work up front tends to make each next stage easier. The honest answer is, sometimes I don’t spot blacks until the ink stage because of artist’s block; I don’t KNOW how to solve that problem and am postponing it until I can’t put it off anymore. In this case I didn’t have that problem; high contrast single source lighting tends to make things easier. Unfortunately one can’t light every scene that way, in spite of what Frank Miller thought in “Sin City”.

This is page 10 for "The Mark" issue 3, volume 2, otherwise known as "The Mark In America", published by Dark Horse Comics in January 1994. Written by Mike Barr, Drawn by Brad Rader