I’ll never take any credit for this but it is nice to know I’ve been part of one of the ten best eras of the Captain America comic book according to Comics Alliance. They seem to think the Operation Rebirth storyline is worth mentioning as one of the best.
The action picks up. More panels per page, more suspense… and more stuff to draw. And more reference needed. But let’s start with the thumbnail sketches.
The trick for this page was to have subsequent horizontal panels featuring a bunch of vertical shapes, the trees, without them looking too much like they’re one and the same. I tried to make them go out of the frame in different spots and changed the grey VS black tones to avoid as much confusion…
This is the page where the Raven, being our narrator, propels us into the story. In a way, Maelstrom is nothing but a campfire story. Only here, it’s a raven that has a flashlight under its beak. Ha! Here is the thumbnail sketch used for the final page. Note that I decided to drop the top…
Here’s the second half of the “big” layout. I waited until now to show you the thumbnail sketch. Trying to avoiding a spoiler, here. To me, it still works as two single page as both halves show the character answering each other. It’s as if the first half is one character speaking and the second…
For this one, I hesitated. I didn’t know if this page (and the next) was just redundant and made the action slow down. I still don’t know. You tell me. What made me keep it is the design, although I wanted to get the story moving progressively faster with more panels per page, the idea was…
As I said before about the previous page, I was thinking of a larger layout that could combine page 3 and 4 into a vertical format. Here’s the bottom part of the design; we’re inside the house with the tree growing in the middle.