The Unseen Bianca #8

This is a series of short articles about the mistakes, mishaps and favourite bits of Bianca and the Satanic Witches web comic - things I want to high light for one reason or other. Especially stuff that has been hidden until now.

This second article is about Bianca and the Satanic Witches episodes #36-40.



At the start of episode #36 our heroines are going to battle - the same all around thrashfest that is still going on in our regular series, by the way. I drew this big opening image to hopefully capture the reader from the very first page.

It got obscured by the two other images but this is how it looks just by itself:

Here is quite a similar situation from the next issue, #37, from page three:

In the page four of the #36 we have an even stranger page composition - one of my favourites, in fact, since it kind of symbolizes how the panic is getting a hold of Anya and the events are starting to roll out of her control.

The only trouble is, I once again quite like the big background panel by itself: I think it's one of the better Anya-shots we have in the comic.

Also the smaller images were drawn quite large - since I obviously wanted to have a decent amount of detail in them - but I'm not so sure you can make out quite easily and clearly enough what is happening in them. Here are the line arts of just those panels:

Notice how weird that panel of Stuart looks without the blood.

On the page four of issue #37 I once again made some miscalculation. The panels are all of the same size and make this kind of vertical row, but they don't go all from the top to bottom but are more like a descending line - a kind of diagonal, you could say. This made me put one of the speech bubbles - which there are many on this page - in a slightly wrong place obscuring Vernon's face from the third panel.

Kind of crappy, don't you think? This is how just that image looked originally:

I also don't know in hindsight if I made the transitions between flashback and "the now" quite clear enough in this issue. I assumed it was enough to tint the aforementioned completely green but then again I never wanted to tint Bianca's nice purple hair or blood which is a very important element to me. So like in the example above, we just jump from flashback to "now time" between panels without any transition - I'm not sure if it's clear enough especially on a quick read.

On episode #38 I made this nice background painting of the police station that I really like:

Like backgrounds often do, it got pretty much covered by other panels' corners and speech bubbles - there is a hellish amount of dialogue in these police station scenes! So it ended up looking like this:

And finally, to play us out, here is Lorena in the rain, pissing on a dead enemy from the final splash page (#8) from issue number #39:

Here is also the line art:

No real reason why. I just happen to like this issue quite a bit: I think it's my best "action scene" yet. Also this ending picture, gratuitous as it is, might be the best thing I have ever drawn.