Hello Readers!
Well. What a journey it has been. I hope you've enjoyed it. I'm pretty sure you won't like the abruptness of this ending, but let me know (I can't imagine you, IG, not voicing your thoughts, good thing too!).
In my defence, had I put in a bit more background and a panel here and there (which, I could still do, Your Honour) it might make a bit more sense and feel less abrupt. Anyway, here you go. The final installment of Flight of Fancy.
Page 130
Page 131
You might not care about the artwork and I am delighted you don't stumble on the drawings and they help tell the story seamlessly such that you're in it, not seeing it. That's great.
But I care about the artwork, which is why I put this thing up here; to (as you requested IG) tell a longer form story, to draw it and talk about the drawings and the process. I've never written or drawn a graphic novel.
That first panel has some of my favorite tricks - drawing cars and people small, as if they are models we're looking down on, but putting Fancy and Amar closer to the camera adds some nice depth and allowed me to put the dialogue in context. Panels 2 and 3 are nicely drawn, especially the image of Fancy. If her design wasn't settled before this (2nd last page), it wouldn't ever cement!
And page 131, inside the trailer. I really like these two panels - nice perspective, characters placed well. I had to draw and paste in a few more people into the photo (2nd last panel) which is why the blue lines are a bit of a jumble.
So... about the story and the way I told this ending, I really didn't want the shouting match and forced dialogue between Fancy and Lawrence in which he reveals why he did all this. I don't believe those shouty shout-fests are realistic. I think they are there for the audience to understand why things were done. If the storyteller did their job right (which I didn't) and shows a character's experience well enough (I should go back and add more from Lawrence's past), then they should piece together the reasons for the character's actions.
About Lawrence, he doesn't care if people know why he's done what he did, so why would he explain? For some reason he feels justified. Isn't that how life is... why does anybody do anything, and do we even know why we, ourselves do things? Not always completely.
Regarding Fancy's line about "a cork board covered in a spider's web of yarn strung between pictures and cryptic messages on post-it notes", I find that (cork board) is a tired image that speaks about someone's convoluted, often crazy plan. If you have to make a plan so convoluted that you can only keep it in your head by making one of these cat's cradle things, how do you put on your pants in the morning, and if the police have to make one up to figure something out, maybe they need to go to the "the simplest explanation is often the correct one".
Lawrence might want to blow up as many jets as he can and wreck Fancy's life, but he's not crazy.
... and yes, I see as I write this post that Lawrence should not have said he didn't want to hurt Fancy and her mom. He's obviously got a hate on for Fancy's (dead) father, so why not spread the hate around a bit further!
I did want to work in a thread against the Canadian Government and
Canadians in general thinking they are helping when they should probably
just stay out, especially in over-seas military conflicts. I don't
know, I'm no politician or global strategist, I just draw stuff.
So... there you go. Again, I hope you enjoyed the ride. After all said and done I think it worked out pretty well, even though I didn't write out the story before hand. The only thing I wrote was one page of dialogue (about mid way through the story) and the epilogue. It is more fun, and more challenging, not to write it out ahead of time, but I think doing so would have helped the story turn out better, but I felt by doing so, I'd be killing my interest in drawing it - I needed to discover the story as I drew it.
So... what to draw next?!