Astro Gator Number 13
Dated 3/7/03. Lucky number 13. Astro Gator must make some emergency repairs to his ship on the way to Kobayashi Station, but his repairs are interrupted by an approaching ship.
I was still working on pacing. The first two panels are not strictly necessary. I didn’t think of them as filler, but they look like filler to me now. If I were writing this today, I probably would have gone straight to the approaching ship. I was trying to generate suspense, and suspense usually works better if it is preceded by a small lull, but this lull is too dull.
You can just make out the white-out I used in the middle panel in this scan. Any comic artist who draws by hand uses it, but it’s best to avoid it if you can. I could have altered the scan to erase the traces of white-out, but that requires extra time and effort that I don’t really feel like taking. Retouching something like that in a digital image can be surprisingly tricky even if it’s black-and-white. Paper is not perfectly white, so you either have to push up the contrast too high or grab the white shade from the surrounding art and paint over the white-out.
Start at the beginning: Astro Gator Number 1
