When is a Story NOT a Story?

Well, the answer is pretty simple - when one is playing around! While these pages have dialogue, captions, and whatnot and can obviously be read, these pages are not meant to be a story. Even though it looks like a story. Yeah, I know. Ahem.

I wanted to muck around (yup, that's the technical term) with lettering and storytelling rather than work on an actual story. I really just wanted to test out some ideas and see how they play out in practice. I'm always constantly learning, trying, failing, trying again, and playing with art and a "story" like this is a great example of that. But it's good to pull out from the abstract and actually try things in ink and the following four pages do just that.

My approach was pretty simple: draw first, script later, and just try and link images together and see what happens. I didn't do any design work; I just plowed on in. Once I had stuff roughed out, I figured out some dialogue that seemed to fit the panels. Kinda like the old Marvel Method of creating comics. You'll see a few references pop in with the text. Notably a quick nod to Raiders of the Lost Ark. I generally don't like doing that, but hell, I was playing and that's part of the fun.