Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part 3

Roughs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page one.
Original version (left) and revision (right).
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Slightly belated post for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three. This episode fought me a bit regarding the Dirty Frank execution tableau in panel six - my first try (left) seemed to me insufficiently dramatic and also possibly a bit unclear. I decided to go instead for a slightly more diagrammatic angle, with a clear view of the sword descending towards Frank's outstretched neck, and everyone is slightly more dynamic poses. To help the storytelling flow I also flopped panels 3-5 left-for-right. This is just the kind of correction you can make by hand with tracing paper and a light box, but by gor it's quicker and easier on computer.

Pencils  for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page one, with revisions.Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Here are the pencils for page one - as you can see, I got to the pencilling stage before deciding to change panel six. These pages were done in Adobe Illustrator, which allows you to work on the area surrounding the page - so I could shift the roughs and pencils for panel six out onto the surround for safety in case the new panel design didn't work out (3). The same is true of the first try at drawing the right-hand Samurai in panel one (1). And because Illustrator has no Page Rotate Tool, it was easier to draw Aimeé's head the right way up off-page and then copy and rotate it in place in panel one (2).

Roughs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page two.
Original version (left) and revision (right).
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Roughs for page two: Aimée's knock-kneed pose in panel two risked looking silly, and Frank was obscured by the foreground Samurai. The revision (above right) tidies the composition up, with all the characters in more dynamic poses to boot. The change of angle between Aimée and the Samurai meant I also had to re-draw her hand blocking the sword in panel one - the blade slicing down between the fingers had slightly more "ouch!" factor too.

Panel four (the close-up of Aimée looking down) is one of those shots that look dodgy at the rough stage, but polish up quite well at the pencilling and inking stage. Despite a lot of time spent tweaking it, the  apparently-simple shot of Yakuza boss Yamaguchi in panel five never quite came right. I re-did this panel three times and he still ended up looking like a Kubrick. The sort of thing that makes me wince when I see it on the printed page, but with deadlines to meet, after three tries, you let it go.