The Ring 6

 My work in this piece is cleaning up in terms of detail but the panel count falls. I really feel like the cramped nature of the first pages four pages was a good thing: it felt more intimate, like Terry was telling you his story up close. What I've learned is to try to get into the head of the main character as much as possible otherwise you've got just bodies humping mindlessly. I was getting that before and with this page I feel that I'm not, so much. This page starts to feel more third person objective in it's closeness to the character, in other words it backs away from him and feels less 'interested'.

Jack Kirby said he lived what his the characters he was drawing were living. Felt what they felt. That's what makes this one work as well as it did in the first four pages. I know Terry very well because I more fully imagined him. And so I can better tell his story.

Also I see that I wasn't skimping on the backgrounds in most panels back when I did these. There's a textural heft to these moments that are caught in each frame because of the background detail setting off the figure. And the story is told much more completely because of the completeness of the backgrounds. Some artists get away with bypassing the background...Smudge comes to mind...but they usually are putting their weight behind other aspects of the story, ie the figures or the gag, and for them it works fine. But me, that's not what I'm about.

Here we have story and telling a story is my strength. As far as I know ( leaving aside The Girl and anything else I may be out of date on...) no one else is doing actual stories in the erotic comics area. Not in the US anyway.