Revisiting issue #17
Okay, so having finished issue #19 of Lloyd and the Bear you’d think I’d go and finish up issue #20 next right? Right?!? Yeah…. no. So one afternoon I went back and had a look at issue #17. Like, for no reason other than just aimlessly having a look but the ‘Ninja Turtle’ short story bugged me.
I wasn’t a fan of the writing and I realised the sound effects looked a bit naff too. It was the first short I’d done for this book and it just felt different. I thought I’d made my peace with it at the time arguing that the sound effects more fitted my own look and the writing was supposed to be a bit rough but y’know, the sound effects just didn’t work and the writing was actually rough rather than just ‘supposed to be’ so it was time to go back and make some changes.
And yeah, this took longer than planned as I didn’t have many pages that didn’t have the speech bubbles on them and I hadn’t kept the colour scheme either so I had to be creative with what new writing I did to at least fit it in – or be larger – than the existing speech bubbles!
So first of all, here’s the original and updated pages;
I spent a week on this making changes and then changing the changes and then changing the changed changes (you get the idea!). The opening panel was supposed to be a cute nod to what I was doing here with a Ninja Turtles-esque story but it just didn’t feel right. I had moved on to saying ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Extraterrestrials’ but that just came off stupid so I pulled back and made the snail sound more like a fanboy.
The writing at the end of page 3 and in to page 4 wasn’t working for me either. It just felt clunky and also, how did the snail know so much about what happened in the sewers?!? So yeah, more changes.
Now I did originally have sound effects (which I’ve since deleted… oops) but they were all super smooth and blocky and nothing like those in the original TMNT so I went back and messed them up a bit.
I’m much happier with how it looks now (even though as typing this I went back and updated the ‘Doof’ effect as I’d missed that originally as I was going through these pages) and now officially closing the door to this issue.
Issue #20 sound effects here I come!
More soon! Bear hugs!
PS. Adding the bandana to the snail was a real 3am-and-not-being-able-to-sleep idea that I put together the next morning. I admit, it looks kinda weird but hey, it’s a talking snail so what you gonna do?!?
