I'm really doing it!

It may seem sad that I'm writing this on a Friday night, but I've had an overwhelmingly social week. Squirreling away in the office to navel-gaze obsessively has been just the ticket.

Previous installments are here.

A long, long time ago, I started prematurely annotating the Scott Pilgrim series, providing references and "what was he thinking"-type information.

Last summer I printed up Volume 1 and 2 annotations and sold a pile of them at TCAF (with another small run at Chapel Hill Comics late last year, if I recall correctly).

NOW: Filled with dread, nervous to annotate Volume 3, I have yet to even post the end of Volume 2's annotations online.

So I'm doing that today.

If you've read the printed edition from last year, you've read most of this - it's just cleaned up and a few sentences added here and there. (And please note that I won't be reprinting that version, but hopefully will put it all together in a new format after finishing volume 3 and maybe 4.)

Previous installments are here.

I feel like I have a never-ending supply of old notes, sketches, odds and ends, but, uh, I don't. Anyway, here's some more.

That page there is the FIRST PAGE EVER DRAWN!

And if you click here, you can see the original plot outline for the first half of Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, scribbled down the margin of a page of notes.

On my flickr there's some other stuff, like pages of script, and I even dug up one of the original release party flyers.

I think Volume 3 is the only one with unused art, really.

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Unused page which constitutes an entire unused flashback scene. Was replaced with this page in the book. A bunch of pages were rearranged or deleted in this section.

Reasons for deleting this page:

• dumb
• boring
• unnecessary

Was the replacement page any better?

• Not really

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Unused 2-page spread. Reason: I thought I could use the space better. It was featured in a preview on a comics news site, sort of against my will. As such, it will be on the internet forever. I am uploading it here anyway, for posterity.

The version posted on the comics news site possibly contained errors or was truncated in some way. That whole preview had a bunch of stuff that I later changed or deleted.

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Evidence that I have no idea what I'm doing.

At least I do like the final version better than the others, though. I fixed up a lot of the early Envy stuff later in the book (redrawing panels and rewriting some dialogue), when I had a better handle on the character. I think it helped.

An early version of the Scott Pilgrim V3 cover, scrapped. It went around the internet fifty times before I scrapped it, of course. I still see it all over the place to this day. The internet is a horrible place.

Thumbnails: pages 168-185 (minus a few)

This is how I was thumbnailing for most of Volume 2. It looks nice, but it's kind of a waste of time for me, so I gave up on it.

These were drawn straight to pen. The dark grey marker indicates black fills, and the light grey marker supposedly indicates screentone. I mean, it works, I guess, but it's kind of like you could spend more time on these than the actual pages. They're more show-offy than practical, I think. (So I'm showing them off! Go me!)

Note how I skipped pages I wasn't sure about, figuring I'd come back to them later. I know 179-183 (mostly blank on this page) were the very last things I drew for this book.

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Thumbnails: pages 84-87

Thumbnails to one of my favourite scenes.

When I penciled the scene, I ended up drawing Ramona on the recliner in a few panels, moving back and forth fluidly, depending on how deep in the doghouse Scott is at the moment. I think that little change made the scene way better. It's just a thing that happened on the fly, without a lot of thought. The characters' personalities come out at different stages sometimes.

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Breakup scene, In-depth (pages 48-51)

In the script, they broke up and then it went right to the next scene. On the script I seem to have drawn a line below the scene and scribbled "INSERT 2 PAGES of SCOTT on the bus alone".

The first run-through of thumbnails is pretty shakey as to what I wanted to get out of the scene. I left it alone for a while -- my files say page 47 was finished January 7th 2005, and page 48 was finished February 9th -- and I guess I came up with a visual idea that I think works pretty well.

Unfortunately, I don't have much more insight than that! They... Scott's on black and Knives is on white and they get smaller and smaller? And then there's this weird pseudo-symmetrical scene of him riding the bus (two of my favourite pages in the book, I think).

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Vol. 2 Trivia

• I finished 35 pages in my last 5 days of work. >:O
  
• The last pages I did were the skateboarding spread and aftermath (pages 122-127) and the burrito restaurant flashback leading up to (and including) the Lee's Palace spread (pages 178-183). The spreads got left til last because I was dreading them, and yet they both turned out really well. The restaurant thing got left because I wasn't quite sure what I was doing with it.
  
• I jumped ahead and did the ending (the last 20 pages or so) about halfway through the book. I think my reasoning was that I wanted to draw that stuff while still feeling fresh, and not have to rush through it (probably because the ending of Volume 1 was incredibly rushed).

It was a dark and stormy night, and I decided to continue my Annotated Pilgrim series with some more of Volume 2. The rest of Vol. 2 will follow eventually. I got through a little more than this, but I thought I should quit while I'm ahead.

I'm thinking of printing up the annotations from Vol. 1 and 2 and offering them as a sort of minicomic zine thing at APE and MoCCA this spring, hopefully with added art and possibly short comics.

Previous installments are here.

( Volume 2, Part 2 )

I wrote this up a while ago, so maybe if I clean it up and post it, it'll encourage me to continue.