Welcome back!

It’s the 4th of July so I packed up my dogs and computer this Tuesday to try to find a part of California without fireworks!

If you’re new here, I’m Daniel McCloskey, BeanCanDan on the internet, and this is where members of the BeanCan Book Club get an entire month’s worth of commentary before the rest of the internet! If you want even more video time-lapse commentary you can get that for as little as a dollar per month at Patreon.com/Freemoney If you want to read a comic about my comics journey Failing (to Quit) is available for free on most digital comics platforms and for sale in print at my store.

T14 Commentary:

Cloud Town page introducing our chief villain, Niomi.

This classic “mean-girl” schene is not too different from the main pitch, but I still drew and re-drew it over and over…. some of that was for reasons I re-discovered while watching the timelapse video with my family (subscribers can see that on my Patreon HERE). Those reasons include late requests to add page numbers and change some basic formatting. But some of the redrawing was due to my own lack of satisfaction, and after watching every episode of the Japanese TV show MANBEN (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) I have come to learn that I am not alone as a cartoonist that gets in a kind of doom loop where I can find myself erasing and redrawing basically the same thing forever. The creator Stephen McCranie does a good job of managing those impulses, and if you’re a cartoonist looking to increase your speed with fundamental choices about your process, I recommend the artist tier on his Patreon. I was experimenting with big blocky backgrounds to guide the eye and save time on this page. I’m not sure how I feel about them, but I don’t think there’s a big difference between my first draft of this page and my final. But then again I like scratchy energetic or “rough” looking art. I wonder what you all think about the backgrounds here. Shoot me an email if you want to talk about it!

T15 Commentary:

I also redrew this page a lot of times considering how similar it is to the original pitch (this will be a consistent trend throughout the first 60-ish pages of the book). This is a good example of a page that shows how I think of motion. Details are important, suspense is important, and I don’t know where I got inspired to start putting diagrammatic-style arrows all over the place, but they do truly make me happy. Not sure why!

P.S. when I read this pannel by pannel in a middle school one girl gasped aloud as the milk was poured on the lunch tray, and looked around wide-eyed at her other students. Sometimes the grounded moments can make a bigger impact that a monster smashing a building. ;-)

T16 Commentary:

Okay, so that “history assignment” is the crumpled paper back on the introduction page with the map of Cloud Town and about the creation of the skateboard during WWII. It the video commentary I recorded about this page my sister was cringing because of how much I was redrawing hands and faces that were totally fine. I was really getting into an insecure loop on this one. This, or something like this, happened during lunch at my school from time to time. It was a big semi-unsupervised space where any altercation was seen by a huge mass of our peers and therefore had a bigger impact on a student’s social standing than if it happened in the hall between classes or after school. Some of the drama inherent in a high school setting is that everything happens in front of everyone.

T17 Commentary:

On this page, my editor was a little confused as to why Niomi didn’t react by either attacking Pen outright or telling a teacher, which is an understandable pushback, and in fact neither had occurred to me as a possibility for Niomi. As a classic “mean girl” she is obsessed with power via social status. When this kind of brinkmanship occurs in that semi-supervised space immediate retaliation gets you in trouble because the attention of the room has shifted your way, and telling a teacher can make you look weak in the eyes of your classmates. Niomi will always escalate a situation, but always in as cowardly a way as possible. She doesn’t attack Pen unless she thinks Pen won’t respond. She always attacks the weakest link and always does it when teachers aren’t looking. I’ve written a few hundred rough pages about Niomi that are just sitting on my computer. I hope to draw those out for you someday. Anyway, do you have stories of cafeteria brinkmanship? What are they?

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

-Daniel McCloskey

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