My favorite pages from The Way Back Home – Places 1 to 10
Last week, I posted the places 11 to 20 from my personal top list of all pages from the previous chapter The Way Back Home. Now I want to post my top 10. The following pages are listed in chronological order.
You can vote for your personal favorite of these 10 pages with the voting widget in the right sidebar!
I would have a very hard time to pick my favorite chapter cover, but I guess the one for Monster would win in the end. Nonetheless, this cover page again turned out very well. I spent a lot of time to perfect Powree’s drawing of the music note by playing around with effects and layer blending in Photoshop.
The last two panels of this page are just perfect, starting with Viviana’s joyful anticipation over Joril’s sly smile to Viviana’s disgruntled state in the last panel. Powree really nailed their facial expressions.
And this page is the perfect continuation. Viviana and Ilias are adorable when they’re arguing with each other. 😉
When Viviana was taking the book from the shelf in the previous page, some readers made wild guesses what she had found. Of course nobody got it right. I think the humorous episode in the inn was a necessary change of pace after dozens of serious pages.
I’m still amazed by the way Powree has drawn the rain and the magical umbrella. Just gorgeous!
I love the variety of the locations of the projectors in the various cities of Ileasaar. You really get a feeling for the different architecture styles. I considered adding captions for each city (Heyselfall, Firecreek, Bluebluff, Greendew, Aerius, Palace in Aracona), but I didn’t want to cover the great artwork with even more text boxes.
I thought a long time about what Viviana could say to prove her identity. And I’m still confident that I came up with some very convincing facts. In contrast, many suggestions by readers in the comment section of the previous page would have e.g. only asserted that she’s a member of the Shadowdancers, not that she’s Jael Bara.
The magical explosion just looks fantastic. Powree really outdid herself with this page. The scene looks much more gruesome than it turned out in the next page, which was fully intentional. Sometimes you have to mislead your readers a bit. >:-)
I had the scene of Viviana attacking Bahamut in my head for years before I was finally able to write the script for the last pages of The Way Back Home. Putting song lyrics into a comic is often problematic, but I’m of the opinion that it works very well in this instance. A truly emotional page!
This is my favorite page from this chapter and it may even be my most favorite page in all of Gaia. I asked Powree to draw several sketches for this page and requested much more changes than usually. I wanted this very important page to look as good as possible with a perfect composition. And the page turned out even better than I anticipated. The main reason for this is the great design of the sundog and the beautiful blue background that work perfect with each other. Coloration, lighting, composition, camera position, character placement, I don’t know how any of it could have been done better.
A great chapter, now looking back at these pages…
The last one is indeed spectacular.
I still think the singing before didn’t work out as well (too much Disney-like), but there were so many great moments in the story – with mighty explosion or cute Vivi, e.g…. It is worth reading several times.
Thank you for your wonderful work, Oliver!
I didn’t see at the time, but in the #203 (Vivi killing the Bahamut), it looks like the backlash from the knife also killed the other 2 good dragons that were fighting Bahamut before her jump. I don’t remember it being mentioned after…
Accually, I really like #202 as well. The close up on Vivi and the Bahamut looks really nice. But I gues, you should see 201-203 as flowing together.