Illuminating letters: craft club

Dear reader,

In practising my comic making craft, I’ve found myself coming back to one post by Robert James Russell time and time again. This one.

It’s a really useful guide to how “transitions between panels play a crucial role in storytelling, pacing, and conveying the passage of time and events.“ The idea of being a director within a comic has stuck with me. So, I thought it was only right that I tried out the exercise of adapting a film scene comic, as a way to both train your eye for what works and understand how to convert action into static frames.

Robert suggests choosing a film you know well and focusing in on one scene, then breaking it down across a page. I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the early 2000s recently, so Garden State felt like an apt pick.

If you’ve not seen it Garden State follows a struggling actor who reconnects with his emotions and his life when he returns home to New Jersey following his mother’s death. Depending on who you ask it’s either a cult hit with a perfectly crafted soundtrack or the epitome of self-absorbed indie twee. When I watched it in my teens I loved it.

I wanted something with a little bit of action, so I decided to adapt the funeral scene from early in the film where we understand why Andrew has flown home - you can watch it from 5:21 (warning: there is some mild swearing).

This is how I adapted it into a short two page comic.

Page 1: Panel 1 - We don’t see Andrew’s mum’s photo or that much of the cemetery until later on, but I wanted to establish our scene more concretely as there aren’t any sound cues.

Page 1: Panel 2 - I loved the overhead shot and thought it would be the moment to bring in the music, but also to expand what you can see in the space to include Andrew a few feet away as well.

Page 1: Panel 3 - I wanted to almost zoom in across these perspective change frames so we go from the whole congregation, to Andrew’s view to just Andrew in increasingly small boxes hemming him in and almost mirroring his mum’s photo facing all the grave stones at the top of the page.

Page 2: Panel 1 & 2 - I kept this section simple with moment-by-moment frames tracking the action.

Page 2: Panel 3 - Here I wanted to reuse the perspective changes in the conversation, but I wanted to shift back to the grave site for the final exchange to emphasise more of the awkwardness and absurdity of the conversation.

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Here’s how it all comes together with the dialogue

I thoroughly enjoyed this as an exercise, not just because it meant going back and watching a film I once loved. It got me thinking about pacing but also how to build more of a sense of space and tone using my choices across panels. I think can tend to try to do to much in too few frames, whereas spending time on just a single scene highlighted how much richness you can get from pausing and showing more perspective.

That’s all for now, but I’ll be trying to put these learnings too good use in upcoming comics.

Write/draw again soon,

Natalie