I'm on a BOAT!

Backgrounds are often treated as just that: backgrounds. Simply the background against which the story is taking place. Oftentimes, comic creators are tempted to go with very average locales: an office building, a house, a park, etc. Sometimes, the story calls for it, and it works for the way the plot progresses.

But I think that a lot of potential is missed here. One unique quality in many comics outside the US is the attention to environments. Many times, the camera is pulled out a bit more to reveal where the characters are, and the locales are far more unique and interesting. This is often the result of treating environments as characters themselves. I used to think that paying too much attention to backgrounds would distract the reader from the characters, but then I read Osamu Tezuka's "Buddha," and then I changed my mind.

My drawing here is an unfinished panel (what's left is mostly just shading in various areas). It's the first panel of the scene, and I used the down-shot not to create isolation but to display where exactly the characters were. Since I lived most of my life land-locked, I didn't know anything about boats. So the research was enormous, because I knew I needed some very specific details about this scene. Not only did I look at pictures of docks and boats, but also the way other artists did similar scenes (Leonard Starr and Al Williamson, particularly).