As the Co-director, shouldn't you deserve a share of credit for the dazzling, wonderful uniqueness?
For those curious in our production processes, this is probably a good time to describe what a director does in a comic book. It's kind of an odd title, but it's not that much different than what a director does in film.
The scriptwriter sets the scene for the issue. Both literally and figuratively. The scriptwriter has a plot, fleshes out characters, works on dialogue, focuses on themes throughout the books, refers to existing canon, selects the scenes, ticklers, ticklees, outfits, angles, zooms, panel focuses, captions, and all that jazz that an art studio takes and translates into a comic book.
Once all that's done, the script will need some work. That's where an editor comes in and helps out with revisions. What Jon does is much more involved than just editing, though. After the revisions are made, the direction comes as production gets underway. We both have a say in how the development of the issue plays out. When we get back storyboards, pencils, inks, colors, and letters, and each of these stages corrections need to be made. Sometimes panels in the script need to be emphasize or de-emphasized. Sometimes the characters look odd, or the laughter doesn't look as intense as the script indicates. Sometimes outfits looks bizarre, colors come out flat, and dialogue is lackluster. There are a lot of pages to review and it's good to get two people to sign off on them. It's not necessary, of course, but having two people looking at our releases (a tradition we started with Dave2112 several years ago) has created a production environment which has substantially increased the quality of our releases.
During one of the next production previews I should show some more examples of direction we give during production. I know there are some of our readers interested in how the books come together and some of the thought processes that go behind it. We have the recent contest winners will join us for a pre-production meeting on The Agencies #19-20, it might be fun to start off a production journal from both my own and Jon's point of view of a comic, starting with how the meeting went. That would be fun.
Looks good. Will pick this up on my next paycheck.
Awesome, hope you enjoy
🙂