Cornered Animal

My encroaching mental illness rears its ugly head as I decide to try to draw an action scene. Action scenes take a lot longer than talking heads scenes to draw, for obvious reasons. There's all the business of posing bodies for action that really gets old very fast, especially when you're trying to do something visually more interesting than two two-dimensional people hitting each other, like Street Fighter or something. Posing for fights is awkward because more often than not it's not simply a matter of drawing one person in a pose, another in a different pose, and slapping them side by side: you have to draw them together, and make arms connect where they're supposed to connect without extending them past anatomical believability.
A fight scene needs punchier pacing than a regular scene (I went for slanted panel borders for that sense of urgency and chopped-up time) and can't fall back on dialogue to pick up the slack, since if you've ever attended a pub fight in your life you know that there isn't a lot in the way of meaningful dialogue exchanged during the fight itself, mostly just swearing and loud directions of what the combatants want to do next. All the meaningful or intelligent conversation happens before and after fights, never during. (Fighting has a lot in common with sex, really. An act of condensed emotion bracketed by a build-up and a wind-down.)
Of course, one of the things you can do if you want to cut down on the time spent drawing a fight scene is not draw a fucking x-ray panel. Whatever insanity persuaded me that was a good idea should be forcibly extracted from my brain and shot. (Although, to be fair, that panel looks pretty damn nice.) I spent a good couple of hours carefully flipping through one of Mary's anatomy books getting all the skeletal structure down and counting ribs and vertebrae, then inked it in negative so I could invert the image into x-ray on PotatoShop 7 (and then play around with layers and effects for a good forty-five minutes getting it to look more authentically like an x-ray shot.)
Overall, though, I'm pretty pleased with the way the scene turned out: it did what it was supposed to with a fair degree of ultraviolence and some artistic wankery thrown in for good measure. Ideally a fight scene like this that's been seven months or so in coming would stretch four or five pages, but in a webcomic with serial updates that's really a completely unworkable idea, not to mention the fact that I couldn't keep up any kind of decent standard of work on a two-week fight scene. One part works well, self-contained. I'm happy with it.

I've got a couple of fight scenes coming up in some guest comics in November, and after that, if I still feel an artistic urge to have a go at some more, I've got 'The Magnificent Five' to have a crack at them on. Not sure how well action scenes will slot into next year's Shit Happens -- I'll talk it over with Mary and see what she thinks, though.