I’ve been laying out the pages for the crossover with the part of the script I’ve written so far. Nothing drawn beyond page one of course, but I’m up to page 14 and I estimate that I have enough script to get to somewhere in the ball park of 25-30 pages.

As opposed to the Funnies, where I use a comic strip approach, I’m using a comic book approach for the crossover. I don’t have to worry about a gag fitting on one page. So instead of writing gags that can be encapsulated in 4-6 panels, I just write out dialogue. A conversation can take a page and a half if it needs to and I can start a new scene in the middle of a page, something I wouldn’t do in a strip. Until I started laying it out, I had no idea how many pages the dialogue I’d written would take.

I was going over my old synopsis notes and I realized that the story evolved in my head since I wrote those notes. I thought I’d do things in four parts:

1) Intro/Encounter
2) Seeking Wisdom
3) Working Towards the Goal
4) Final Encounter/Conclusion

I know how parts 1 and 4 work out, I’m still trying to flesh out parts 2 and 3. I’ll need to start writing again. I usually figure out how things out as I’m writing. Maybe the story will end up shorter than I imagined/hoped it would (I’m hoping for a minimum of 100 pages). I don’t want to start drawing until I’ve figured out the whole story. At one page a week once I get started, that means two years to tell the full story. If I build up a big enough buffer, maybe I’ll post more than one page per week.

That’s the update for now. More news next week. About what? Who knows? 🙂