After I relaxed a little and felt that the layout style of the graphic novel was better established, this is what most of my storyboards *really* looked like. I’ve jumped ahead because the storyboards for pages 8-33 are even more scribbly and ridiculous-looking. There are a lot of little changes in the dialogue and art even at this point, and if you look closely you can find some of them. But basically, it’s at this stage that the action solidifies in my head — the “typing stuff into the computer” stage is just an afterthought.

NEXT UPDATE: Monday, March 29!

Another good example of how I expanded the art and used more pages: page 7, the page when Mike stumbles into Theo’s room, was later expanded into two pages. I think the final printed version worked much better. After this point, I started taking it a little easier with the storyboards and drawing them smaller.

NEXT UPDATE: Friday, March 26!

In the final version of the book, these pages were expanded out to three pages, a good example of the decompressing that my editor Kaitlin encouraged me to try. (Yeah, if you thought it had too much dialogue and text in the *printed* book, you don’t even wanna know…) It was a real pleasure to stretch out and use as many pages as seemed necessary to tell the story… of course, the result was that the first chapter was 90 pages, but I think it worked out well.

“Decompressed” storytelling techniques are one of the real strengths of manga-influenced storytelling. When I read old American comics from the Golden and Silver Age, like “Tales from the Crypt,” with their incredibly dense layouts and heaps of text, I just want to throw them across the room. Telling a short story in a few pages is a skill, but I find longer stories much more rewarding. However, the problem is that it requires more of a commitment from everybody — more time commitment from the artist, and more financial commitment from the publisher. I’ve pitched series to American publishers, saying “It’s just two 200-page graphic novels! 400 pages! A mere trifle in manga terms!” only to have them say “Whoa, buddy, can you trim it to half that length? 400 pages is waaay too long.” Similarly, I’ve been told that a 1000-page graphic novel is “unpublishable,” but that’s just five manga-size graphic novels — nothing compared to the 42 volumes of Dragon Ball, or even the 12 volumes of Cardcaptor Sakura. For King of RPGs, I tried to make volume 1 have a satisfying ending (I didn’t want readers to have to wait for a year on some blatant cliffhanger… well, maybe I did a little), but there is much more of the story to be told in volume 2…

NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday, March 24!

Here’s the storyboard for the title spread of volume 1, chapter 1. This was a fun image to design. The ‘Dungeon Master’s Screen’ in the cosmos is inspired by a picture of the “bridge over the stars” drawn by the French artist Philippe Druillet.

NEXT UPDATE: Monday, March 22!

For King of RPGs volume 1, Victor drew all of the final art which appeared in the graphic novel, except for the dungeon map and the map of Syrinais which appears in chapter 1. But for our scripting process, I drew all the storyboards out by hand. I work visually, and it was easier for me to express what I meant — to myself as well as others — by drawing a rough version of the comic pages first.

I drew storyboards for all 200+ pages, but I’ll show just a couple of those pages for now. (Not all the pages were at this high level of detail, of course…. I eventually got lazy…) This is the storyboard of what eventually became pages 1-3. It was originally a single page, but Kaitlin, our editor, felt that it was too dense, a problem that I have a lot because of my own overdetailed art style. (Also, I like shonen manga which tend to be more crowded, like One Piece and Death Note.) So it was expanded out into three pages, which I think worked much better.

NEXT UPDATE: Friday, March 19!

Largehearted Boy is a great music blog which also touches on art, literature and other wide-reaching aspects of pop culture. The author, a man with some gold and levels under his belt, was awesome enough to plug King of RPGs and let me contribute to the “Book Notes” series, where authors choose and explain a music playlist for the books they’ve written. On that note, here is my playlist for King of RPGs volume 1, my selection of rap, metal, nerdcore and ’80s fantasy movie soundtracks that I listened to while writing the first book in the series. Please check it out and, if you haven’t been there before, take some time to explore the site — for gamers specifically, there’s also a playlist by Mark Barrowcliffe for his D&D-playing memoir The Elfish Gene!

New pages uploaded every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday!

And, on that note, this is the last page of the King of RPGs Volume 1 free samples. The final edition of Volume 1 is in stores now, Volume 2 is about halfway drawn, and I’m working on some new King of RPGs apocrypha about which more later. Please feel free to comment or email me if you have any questions about the book for me or Victor. We’ll be posting some sketches and other bonus material soon, and I’ll have more to announce soon on this site!

New pages uploaded every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday!

NEXT UPDATE: Tuesday, February 16

New pages uploaded every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday!

NEXT UPDATE: Monday, February 15

New pages uploaded every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday!

NEXT UPDATE: Thursday, February 11