We continue serialization of the collected edition of the six-issue 2018 miniseries Empowered and Sistah Spooky’s High School Hell, written and laid out by me and featuring art and lettering by Guest Artist Carla “Speed” McNeil and coloring by Jenn Manley Lee.

As I noted earlier, I definitely regret not taking a bolder and more adventurous approach to my writing and layouts on this miniseries, especially given the (ultimately excessive) pagecount available to me. In retrospect, when one has access to serious pagecount in a comics format as I did here, one should not use that extra space to just tell more of the story in the same way. Better, I think, to try to tell somewhat less story (that is, covering fewer plot points) in a different manner, whether that means varying one's panel count per page or trying out new narrative approaches to dialogue/captions/sound FX or experimenting with page layouts starkly opposed to what one usually prefers.  

A good example early in my career was the critical-for-my-development 1994 miniseries Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal, in which I was forced to deploy a host of desperate new narrative techniques to cope with conveying a barrage of background info while managing a series of parallel plotlines in far more limited pagecount. Made for a bumpy read, I'm sure, but the approaches I spaghetti-hurled against the creative wall en masse were certainly bold and adventurous for 1993-era Me.

Continued tomorrow(?)!