After a brief hiatus (the entire Terminus team, along with Steve Seeley, was busy working on Hoax Hunters, which you can find running back up in Hack/Slash), we return with page five, the first splash page of the book.
As was the case with the other pages—and many more in the book—there is a specific effect JM and I were trying to achieve. If you look at page four, you’ll notice that each panel runs in a progression, from small to large. That progression continues, and concludes, with page five, obviously the largest image in the progression.
There’s a few reasons why I designed these two pages in this way. The first was that I wanted another way to separate the prologue pages of the book from the narrative proper (and having text boxes with ‘begin prologue’ and ‘end prologue’ was pretty unappealing to me). JM worked to achieve this in the colors he uses for those first three intro pages, which establishes a tone that is much different from the rest of the book. He mixes bright greens and subdued grays that, we’ll see, are of a very different palette from the pages that follow.
JM and I also established, in those first three pages, layout schemes based on symmetry, which I’ve discussed before. With that in mind, I decided that the best approach would be to achieve a different layout principle, other than symmetry. The end result is what you see in pages four and five: a progression of size.
I think, also, we wanted to give a sense of the world of Terminus opening up. The prologue pages are meant to be very controlled, very confined so to stay true to the themes of the book. Here, we enter the chaos of the system, the dead body, the mystery, the threat to what this society is/has become. Each panel builds on one another until we reach page five and have our perspective framed around the crumpled body, delivering maximum impact. It’s a take on the classic, Chandler-esque dead body imagery, infusing the story with mystery—his identity isn’t given, the dialogue is ambiguous. The idea, in my development of the story, is to give things slowly, to build as pages four and five do and have the reveals all the more meaningful.
I’ll be posting JM’s cover soon, and that may be it for a while, in terms of art. We’re currently working on a package to show publishers at C2E2 next month, and hopefully we have success in getting Terminus in the right hands.
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