Max Riffner
Quick Step
About
Quick Step is about a mouse named Lorenzo Quick, and boy, this kid can dance! Unfortunately, there is another great dancer at school, Jonny B, who has his eyes set on Sandra to take to the Spring Fling. And well, Sandra seems to have her eyes set on Lorenzo. The heart of Sandra is the prize once Jonny challenges Lorenzo to a good ol’ dance-off! But Lorenzo may have other ideas...
Quick Step will be released in webcomic format online on June 2, 2005, and will be updated weekly every Thursday until December (26 weeks).
Page 7
Another week, another page. This one was interesting because in the script, I had written a four panel page. Panels 1 through 3 were supposed to be shots of Lorenzo’s mother walking out of the room, with word balloons trailing out (as seen in Panel 2), and Panel 4 was supposed to show Lorenzo’s reaction. Upon drawing it out though, the repetition (one of my favorite devices) seemed like too much, and I had originally drawn Lorenzo standing very small, letting the words from the previous panel weigh in on him. He seemed cramped and constrained by panel borders – so I erased the panel, which then made him appear like he was just floating and shoved in the corner.
To get around both problems, I combined the last two panels. By dropping out the panel borders, Lorenzo feels like he is surrounded by space, but he is large enough to be grounded. Also, by taking out the last repeated shot of the doorway and having the word balloon that Lorenzo is reacting to be present in the same panel seemed very natural. So really, it was less drawing but more work to come up with a better solution to this page. I’m really happy with the results.
Like Quick Step? Be sure to check out Golden Boy!