The Family Circus-like panel really floored me when I saw it the first time.
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Archive for ‘The Ragbox’
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The attention to architectural detail here is amazing. This is exactly why I wanted to work with Matt Reinke on this chapter. I love seeing it in comics form, and it takes me back to San Francisco – the look and feel of those Victorians in the Mission.
Way behind on posting old work, but I’m catching up now. Dig the titled hallway on this page.
I admit, this song is entirely made up, but how many Spanish songs were likely to list food ingredients like that? I did come up with a melody I really liked for it, but adding an audio chip into every book proved to be too expensive for a self-published work.
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.
I love this first panel on this page. It’s not as grand as the opening splash page, but it really showcases Matt Reinke’s feel for architecture. Roberto’s room is surprisingly… sparse. Probably too sparse. A man’s got to have furniture. I don’t feel that there should be a slavish fidelity to previous renderings, so this may change in future chapters.
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.
I love this opening panel. It’s not as grand as the opening splash page, but it really showcases Matt Reinke’s feel for architecture. Roberto’s room is surprisingly… sparse. Probably too sparse. A man’s got to have furniture. I don’t feel that there should be a slavish fidelity to previous renderings, so this may change in future chapters.
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.
No, it doesn’t look like a comic page, but wait! This is the label that Braden designed for one of the beers advertised in the bar. He actually went through several drafts of it before settling on this one, and I love it. When it came time to layout the print version of Volume 1, I needed an extra page so chapter 3 could start on a verso page. So we decided to take the image and used it as a stand-alone spacer, like this. Sure, it doesn’t work all that well for online comics, but I want you all to get the full experience. So shut it.