How It's Made: A Wolf's Cry - 3

Let's take a look at how it's made for the new page of The Rabbit and the Moon. Take a look at the script, storyboard, and pencils for this week's installment of the comic.

Script

1. The wolf and Hana watch the fireworks for a moment. WOLF I saw the pyre... 2. Shot of the festival with the wolf shrine and everyone dancing around it as it burns. WOLF Made in my image. A celebration of my end. The murder of my mate. My cubs by the hands of that archer. 3a. Hana lowers her head. She recalls the wolf build out of paper, flowers, and wood at the front of the shrine. WOLF I should reap every last one of you. HANA Before Houyi came, what did the villagers do to anger you? 3b. Hana sits down and faces away from the fireworks. The wolf turns and looks at her. WOLF Your kind invaded my mountain and nested here. You hunted my food. You took my land and killed my eldest. How could I ever be mollified?

Storyboard

Pencils

For the second frame, I looked at some reference of Mikoshi, which are the portable Shinto Shrines that folks carry during festivals in Japan. If you remember at the beginning of the chapter entitled The Storyteller, Hana and Natsumi are searching for BunBun (a.k.a. Jade) around a park where a matsuri (festival) is being setup. Hana meets Kamiko again and she tells her the story about Houyi and the wolf and how that became the local legend of their town. In the current chapter, the fireworks are from the festival below (they're high in the mountains after all), and the wolf did peek at the mikoshi of himself, something that the townspeople are carrying through the town in celebration of his demise and ultimately the reason why their town prospered and grew over the thousands of years since then.

Final Art

 

I was considering animating this, but it would literally be flashing colors to simulate the fireworks bursting in the sky (which you can't see) with these camera angles (well maybe except frame 2), but I also thought that a lot of flashing colors wasn't worth the work and might just look really bad and seizure-y. This is why I opted just to color the panels. As I started to use the colors, one per panel, I thought if maybe the colors could be somehow symbolic of each frame, but only the red one seems to work, and maybe you can make a case that blue and green stand for the calmness in the first two frames.

Anyhow that's all for this week's How It's Made, new page comes out this Saturday.