NB! Japanese layout! Reads Right to Left!

This is me getting a little creative with the layout of Dublin. You don’t usually find stuff like that thing Aine just noticed on the streets there 🙂

Part 7: The Rookie Manga-ka Experience

When I had started the course with Nao and MSN, I wasn’t very certain what to expect. I was expecting maybe some kind of advice on page layout and then to work on the one-shot manga page-by-page for the duration of the course, with tips & advice throughout.

What I got instead was something a good deal more intense and thorough than that.

When we had settled on the one shot being based on Bata Neart, one of Nao’s first assignments for me was to create a rough draft plan of the 16 pages that I would ultimately draw. This took to form of several steps, starting with a basic time-line broken into 3 main sections and sub-divided into the various 16 pages. Finally a layout of the page itself was needed for all 16.

Although a very basic layout of the characters was all that was needed here, I felt compelled to put some effort into the artwork of the plan pages (because; how often do you get to pitch stories to a pro manga-ka?) However this served to compound an already stressful time. With the challenges related to having a new baby in the house, coupled with the lack of sleep, my day job, continuing updates for Back Office & Bata Neart, doing my homework was a challenge.

Especially when it ended up looking like this:

rookiemangaka

All 16 pages had to be done within a week, which is the heaviest production load I have ever had to handle.

However, despite my efforts, Nao would review my draft and then get me to do the whole thing again for the following week. The original draft of the story you are reading now is very different to the original draft I supplied to Nao and many aspects changed from that original idea.

It started off as a story set in Ballinafil that could very easily have fit in with the rest of the core Bata Neart continuity (which was sort of my own cheeky plan for it). Nao did not approve that because the story was not considering new readers. I was asked for another 16 page draft. Already exhausted from my last run of 16 I set into the next run anyway.

This time I re-tooled the story to be a condensed version Chapter 5, with Ashling finding Aine and the whole story transplanted to the more internationally familiar Dublin.

Nao reviewed it, made notes with me…and then instructed me to produce another 16 page draft based on the recommendations. And so…that’s what I did. I ended up redrawing the draft nearly 4 times before Nao finally suggested that the draft was good enough and that work could begin.

I had felt kind of run-out by then and had wondered if I had already failed in this course at it’s very beginning, given the amount of re-edits I had to do with the plan. But thankfully Nao reversed that feeling of failure by telling me that this was exactly what rookie manga-ka have to go though when dealing with editors.

My first lesson was more of a simulated experience of what it was like to be a rookie in the manga industry, and that felt kind of awesome…although tiring as hell…

With a plan in place, the work could finally continue.

Next time: Turning Japanese, and new paper!