It took me longer to post this page because I had to kill my first darling for this comic. This used to be a longer scene of Johnny talking about his Yoga leading up to Amber hugging him reassuringly. (And Johnny gets a face full of Amber’s…I’ll leave it to your imagination.) I’d like to have the general audience’s comments on Amber and Johnny’s relationship, even though I’d prefer a more maternal setting. Feel free to tell me what you think.
I also need to practice more on profiles. I adjusted Amber’s eyes and nose in Panel 2, but I feel that it still needs work.
But now we come to the point where Amber deals with the immediate problem of how she’ll put JB to the public. I want him to be running around, of course, but would prefer it to be low profile and local at the start. It might seem more problematic than it really should, but then I have a tool to overcome such problems.
I call it plot grease. It’s something or someone that you add into the main story, which helps unstick a story. It’ll come in a special item such as a gun that should be fired in the future, or a supporting character that arrives to help out. The trick is not to use it too often and have too much things running around making the story more complicated then it should be. (That would be something my previous works were plagued with.)
Example: Amber’s main story—the hook for the comic—is her getting her Animation Studio running, have it rival Lantz Corporation, and in the end surpass it. She needed something to get her dreams rolling, A spark of ignition, so to speak. Having Johnny find her and being that “one little spark” is what I call Plot Grease; a squirt of WD-40…groan…to get her dream started.
There’s another squirt of the can of plot grease coming in the following strips, which will keep the ball rolling as I return the story back to Amber’s hook…and get Johnny’s personal hook (a subplot in the story) rolling in the process.
