The Ragbox

Once again you can see the attention to architectural detail. I drew up the original floorplan for the apartment, and Matt gave it exactly the feel that you expect to see in the Victorian-style houses.

The third page of chapter 3 is an overhead shot of the Ragbox district. This was originally the opening page, but I revised it to create a sense of daybreak, hence the morning paper delivery in the previous two pages. The heavy pencil lines by Matt Reinke were something that we liked so much, he decided to keep them as the principle aesthetic of the whole chapter. I also used close-up crops of this page for the interior front and back cover of the printed Ragbox, Volume 1 book.

The actual layout of the city in this image is not the final map that I decided on for the Ragbox’s layout, but it does share some of the same feel: the crowded, relatively low buildings, the mass of power lines that connect one block to the next, and so on. I designed a map of city early on in the writing process, because I found it necessary to figure out how long it would take the characters to get from one place to another. Their routes were also important. If Roberto walks from home to the groceria, what’s he passing? Who might see him. These things become important to the plot later.

The opening page of chapter 3. Note the cartoonish braking of the truck – probably the only instance that artist Matt Reinke uses this style. I suppose you could argue that page 9 has a Family Circus visual reference, but I don’t think that was conscious on his part.