I’m also trying desperately to avoid any sort of obvious exposition since it’s my least favourite storytelling method. When I’m working on translating my script to pages, “show, don’t tell” comes to mind a lot – it’s normally a prose writing method which generally means to describe the story “through a character’s action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator’s exposition, summarization, and description” (thanks, Wikipedia). I think this applies just as well to comics, especially when the art reaches a certain level of quality and you can draw what you mean, rather than describing it through dialogue or narration. Comics are a visual medium, after all.

Unfortunately, this approach (or at least, my interpretation of it) tends to make things rather decompressed since it requires a lot of visual space, which is obviously at a premium when you’re working in comic pages. This is especially true since Red Moon Rising is fairly character driven – there’s a lot that could be cut out to that end, whole sections, but I think the whole comic would lose a lot of depth for it. Plus every scene is serving the overall plot in addition to developing characters, it’s just not apparent yet how to everyone who’s not me.

And while I’m hopeful that everything so far reads well and quickly in one big go, and has at least intrigued people on a level beyond “ooh, art”, I’m 40 pages in and the plot hasn’t actually coalesced yet. It strikes me as a little ridiculous, but also necessary, and I know it will start to come together within the next two or three chapters. I won’t pretend the pacing is perfect, but I’m doing my best! The idea behind the extra updates is to mitigate the nature of the story a little – more updates simply equals more story content.

Anyway, the TLDR of it is that I just want to say thank you to everyone who’s reading Red Moon Rising for being so very patient while I build this up. 🙂 The feedback has been wonderful so far, and I really appreciate it.

*Note from the future: This was originally page 40, which apparently necessitated this long ramble.