Kahnwake – Dan Mazur's Comics

The Eunice Williams Story, page 11

Page eleven of the story I’m working on for Fulcrum Press & Jason Rodriguez’s Colonial Comics anthology. Â Another scene at Kahnawake. Â THIS was all I had for a “script:”

Eunice, about 15 years old, working in the fields, when she sees a handsome young warrior coming back from the hunt. Zing!

This would be the meeting between Eunice and her future husband. Â Eunice did marry a Mohawk man named Arosen, but how or when they met is pure speculation, so I speculated. Â I did some sketches in between caricatures at an event (ignore the silly childrens caricature border and that woman with the glasses):

Then the thumbnail (with bonus silly sketch and some numbers in the margin!):

As you can see, I decided to make this page / scene a bookend for the one on page 8. Two key moments in Eunice’s integration into the community/coming-of-age. I used an almost identical panel layout, with the large panels at top-left and lower-right demonstrating the “arc” of the page via Eunice’s change in attitude; and then the story being pushed along by a series of looks and glances in the smaller panels that take up the top-right and lower-left quarters of the page.

Also I had some problems with the way I drew Eunice in the first panel. Â She looked like she was tipping over. Â I just “straightened” her up with photoshop…

…see? Â (here’s the rough pencils/inks:) (with some of those sketches I did on the caricature sheet thrown in because I couldn’t do any better and why not?)

Oh, and I liked this little pencil sketch trying to get Eunice’s attitude in panel 4, so I just stuck it in the rough as well (before printing it out for light-boxing the final art).

Final line-art:

Final? Â Yeah, right! Â Seeing it now, I feel like Eunice’s head is too small in the last panel. Â I’m going to try and fix that digitally before I color it…

The Eunice Williams Story page 10

Page 10 of the project I’m working on for Jason Rodriguez’s Colonial Comics anthology from Fulcrum Press.

My outline-y script reads:

Eunice further assimilated into Kahnwake culture. Daily life centers very much around corn: planting, gathering, drying, grinding, cooking.
Being invited with the women to the fields is a big moment.

The home life in the longhouse is warm and communal.

So this is essentially a non-sequential page, but a series of vignettes that add up to Eunice’s generally happy childhood at Kahnawake. Â It’s a matter of putting the anecdotes into an overall page design or architecture that really can be read in any order. Â Since she left no written record of her time there, it’s all made up.

I definitely wanted to make use of the very first sketch I did for the story:

Longhouse interior with Eunice and new family

Then Â lot of scribbling to figure how to arrange things:

The thumbnail:

Eunice Williams story, page 10, thumbnail, Dan Mazur

The rough. I decided to curve the drawings in that middle tier around the “archway” of the bottom panel, giving it more of an architectural feel:

The final line art, with blue pencils showing. Â No real reason to show this, I just like the way the blue pencil looks (the scan’s patched together, hence the different coloring):

And the final:

Eunice Williams Story, p 10, Dan Mazur *(line art)

Going to be a challenge to color!