Batman Adventures 5, pages 10 and 11

 I’m continuing to post, in serialize fashion, the rough pages, along with the final printed pages (and the original pages if I still have them) to my run on Batman Adventures. Today we’ll look at pages 10 and 11 of Batman Adventures #5, published by DC Comics in February 1993. This is part two of “Riot Act”, part one having appeared in Batman Adventures #4.

Speaking of “eye-read”, I tried to maintain a left-to-right direction (direction of “eye-read”) as Mario approaches his mother’s tenement apartment. This made page 10, panel 4 challenging. I basically had to cheat the taxi cab onto the sidewalk to give enough room for the ambulance at the far bottom right of the panel. So the “eye-read” for page 10 is, start with a medium close-up on Mario in panel 1, pane right to the Cabbie as he replies, zig diagonally down to panel 2, where we have Mario, again in panel left, Cabbie to the right in medium close up. Continue to panel 3; Mario maintains screen direction and eye-read, looking right towards the off-camera Cabbie. Zig diagonally to panel 4, echoing/re-establishing the basic layout of panel 1 as Mario emerges from the cab; eye-pan right to see the ambulance workers entering the tenement.

On page 11, I was inspired to model Mario’s mother off of Peter Parker’s Aunt May. At that point I wished I had based Mario off of Peter Parker, but it was too late. This is one of my beefs against serialized publishing: I didn’t know, in part one, how things would play out in part two, so I couldn’t take later developments into account in the initial design/conceptualizing stage.