Chapter 29: First Iteration

By the time that Monday came into the equation, Alexander went to school as always and as always, his papers and pens still continue to be present at his desk.

It was time to start the Dragonball franchise and what better way to start it than with the first issue in this regard.

This was now an American comic book and he has to ditch a lot of quirks from Japanese manga like calling issues as chapters.

For starters, instead of right to left, it was better to use the standard left to right. Flipping the pages, arranging the panels, and speech bubbles would follow that general sense of direction.

Alexander did make sure to stay true to some manga conventionalities though such as ditching sound effects and having limited use of speech bubbles and boxed narrations.

Mangakas has mastered narrating through pictures and Alexander had long felt awkward about Western narrative boxes filling the pages.

Although it isn't a general flaw to comic books, it was still better to keep the sense of style that Toriyama used in his version.

He also made sure to use some of what makes American comic books a staple and that has to do so with action scenes and high page count.

There is also the inking part for later but that is conventional to both cultural graphic arts.

Western color pages are something that Alexander wanted to employ in his Dragonball comic.

Unlike manga, which is already celebrated if they have a colored page, comic books revel in the fact that they use color all the time and the normality of it.

Of course, the issue of color is due to the difference in pricing and means of the two mediums but what's stopping Alexander from mixing this and that.

Aside from the issue of color, comic books and manga also have the stark contrast of detailing and simplicity.

Americans do monthly issues and have ample time for coloring and making their characters as detailed as they possibly could.

Japanese has weekly issues to worry about and as such, their art could feel cartoony and simple while lacking in color. They still make up for it with storytelling and consistency.

They mastered that efficiency and consistency from the time constraints and developed the manga style that people would come to know in the future.

While comic book characters feel blocky, shaded, and solid from too much realism; manga has developed their soft and fluid fantasy to make it feel real and relatable.

It is an interesting trend that Alexander noticed throughout the years and felt fortunate that he could allow himself to meddle in between those extremes.

He decided it was better to make use of the best of both worlds and learn from the lapses that they failed to correct.

It is not that these things are representative of comic books and manga. This is just his rough generalization on differentiating the two graphic culture mediums.

These are all the things he pondered about as he paneled, penciled, planned, drew, and minutely listened to the class lessons.

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By the time, the bell rang to signify the end of class and the students are clamoring to leave.

Alexander stayed around for a bit and laid out his papers as much as he could. Twenty-four penciled papers to represent the twenty-four pages that he fit the first issue into.

23 pages for the story until the end where Bulma is introduced with a vehicle crash. The other page is the first page that could be considered the title page and an eye-catching cover with Goku doing a pose.

These pages mostly represent the life of lonely Goku in his forest-surrounded home and what he usually does day to day.

It mirrored Toriyama's original pilot chapter but Alexander opted to show more of how the young Goku fists his way through chopping wood and emphasized more scenes to convey his humorous method of using his tail to catch a monstrous fish.

The art style and story direction through the panels and pages are reminiscent of Japanese manga while the enhanced dramatics of Goku's wood chopping and fish fight being given more clarity is courtesy of American comic books convention.

Even though the current product is just rough penciling, Alexander is already confident that he could get a passing grade from both the Japanese and American audiences.

There is stuff to correct here and there such as his rough line work with the squaring of panels. It is fortunate that everything is still pencil so correcting is a matter of erasing with an eraser and redoing the lines.

Alexander had no way of getting through that as he felt thrown off with the paneling work as the people in his class were awed when they saw something new in his arsenal- the ruler!

Working with rulers and planning out its dimensions is still a work in progress for him, so the extra attention from his onlookers made him mess up even more.

It would become a minor problem after a couple of days though as they would get used to the sight while he would also improve his skill with the straightening tool.

Aside from line work, Alexander could also work more on character expressions and the showing of motion.

Jumping ahead into action and motion is something that could not be avoided when working with a martial arts-heavy story.

Toriyama had some successes on his version and Alexander wanted to emulate and improve on it.

Like every other thing he has done, his memory also helped with the process but it was also quite confounding as the manga's reading and flipping format is the technical opposite of what he is using.

"I could say that my first iteration is somewhat of a success then." This was all that Alexander could comment on himself as he kept his pages and headed out to not miss the school bus.

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By the time he reached home, he quickly jumped into transforming his 'somewhat' into a true success.

The first iteration has lapses and a lot of corrections need to be made. He perfected the linework and made sure to make his rectangles are in order.

His awkward rendition of flimsy speech bubbles and uncentered texts also needed some polishing.

There were even pages that needed an overall redo. It was only later that he noticed his minor change to one page also affected the other pages and made them terribly inconsistent with one another.

A snowball of errors is something he failed to take into account.

Through sheer determination and a lot of re-mendings, Alexander finally stopped on a rendition he was satisfied with.

The 24 papers he worked with at first had now ballooned to 34. It was still the same 24-page comic but with a much better flow and composition.

Alexander's mistakes were shown on the discards and the final iteration would be the staple quality that his next issues would base themselves on.

These hasty edits and unplanned recorrections wouldn't be his last but he could guarantee that the next issues would be all the better for it.

Learning from mistakes and moving forward is the best way to go.