Utmost Prudence @utmostprudence - Tumblr Blog

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A vicious man-eating monster plagues the streets of Dorsey Hill. No one is safe from the Butcher-Beast's hunger, not even the son of the wealthiest man in the city— but the well-to-do Oleander d'Fleur is given a new life when he is magically resurrected by an eccentric young woman named Prudence. The problem is, she's hiding a crucial secret from him: the Butcher-Beast that did him in is none other than Prudence herself.

Read Utmost Prudence by @parkayquarts here or on ComicFury!

#yay pinned post!#utmost prudence #artists on tumblr #original character #original comic #webcomic #obviously this will be more useful when theres more pages out. but im doing it now. gettin all neat and tidy

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L + RATIO + 🍳🍳🍳🍳

#utmost prudence #artists on tumblr #original comic #original character #webcomic

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THAT'S RIGHT WE'RE BACK. AND OLEANDER IS STILL HAVING A BAD TIME :(

#utmost prudence #artists on tumblr #original character #original comic #webcomic

possessedpasm

Oh, sweet Oleander... 🥀

[A Gift for @parkayquarts!]

#:]#artwork

termagax

sketch for @parkayquarts !

#artwork

havi-fart

(👆it/its 😁)

meant to draw this thing since forever. i love my sweetypeety angel so incredibly much. *projects my flavor of transsexual on it*

angel belongs to @utmostprudence the most awesome webcomic by @parkayquarts

#artwork

havi-fart

had this thought the other day and it wouldnt leave my head lol. i liek themmm. everybody STREAM @utmostprudence

#artwork

dingoskidneys

@parkayquarts your Oleander!!!!

#artwork

parkayquarts

prudencts and the utmosts is my faovrite band 💯💯💯

#artwork

parkayquarts

sorry for unzombifying her i just needed to see her fabulous again

#artwork

parkayquarts

EYEEEE wanna know what your composition proccess looks like. when youre organizing the flow of panels and deciding the page layouts and pacing the action & dialogue. whats going thru yr head during that

hiiiii again mag. from the beginning I had basically only had two principles guiding me.

the first was something I remember reading in metamaus, art spiegelman's behind-the-scenes book on the making of maus. spiegelman explained that he conceptualized every row/strip of panels as one discreet "sentence" in comic language, and one full page as a complete "paragraph".

when I started working on those first pages I was trying my DAMNEDEST to adhere to the same principle, maybe too much. I did get a bit obsessive. I've settled into a more comfortable rhythm with it now, but I AM still very deliberate about where I place my page breaks. when I imagine the story in my mind it does flow continuously like a tv show, but within that are sort of natural "beats" that signal a complete thought.

here I'll break down an example. and I'll use just the sketches cause I said I was gonna show you my sketches and that way you get to see something new instead of looking at the pages you've already seen.

page 1: Prudence prepares herself. as you may have noticed I am big fan of 3 identically-sized panels to indicate a sort of "montage" of a process. we're not sure what she's planning yet, but the final panel gives us a clue to lead us into the next page.

page 2: now you can see what she's actually doing: a necromancy ritual in her cavernous parlor cause her broke ass doesnt have any furniture. the big huge panel-less shots like the one here are essentially "establishing shots" that show you more of the space since that's hard to communicate in smaller panels. that context is required for the start of the next chapter because of how much Moving Around in the parlor and foyer area is going on.

page 3: we get a fresh new page for prudence to begin the ritual proper. the panels are tightly cropped on her face as she keeps fucking up, but the the wide shot of oleander shows that it's starting to work.

page 4: smash cut. exterior. late afternoon. angel is doing fuck all. we've switched locations and perspectives, so we need a fresh page for that too. once angel starts running back toward the house where prudence is, we get another page to switch back to her.

page 5: the fewer panels you have on a page, the more important each panel becomes. the crazy magic lightning intensifies... her hairs flying everywhere, it's ramping wayyy up UNTILLLLL....

page 6: PAYOFF. THE MONEY SHOT. but to black and roll credits!!! huge dramatic moments always need the extra space.

...This is where art spiegelman and I diverge on our comic drawing philosophy. in metamaus, spiegelman also explains that he deliberately went with the bare-bones, brutalist grid of rectangles to keep the story respectfully grounded and avoid getting too fanciful.

but I want my comic fanciful as FUCK, and that's where principle number 2 comes in. after reading legendary warrior viscera (yes another lwv shoutout. i owe everything to lwv i mean it.) I had a critical realization: You Can Do Whatever You Want Forever. no, seriously. panel's don't HAVE to be a brutalist grid of rectangles. adding a slant to panels does spice things up but why stop there? panels don't all have to be trapezoids or parallograms or any shape made of all straight lines either. images don't have to BE INSIDE a panel in the conventional sense at all!!! there are so many factors you can play around with: shape, size, color, contrast, spacing, overlapping elements, placement on the page... I've been using a lot of filmmaking language to describe my process, but the thing about comics is that they have MORE compositional possibilities and fewer technical constraints than film does. use that to your advantage!!!!

omg this got so long. anyway ^ photo evidence of me blatantly ripping off nat. sorry nat

#meta

parkayquarts

ALSO ALSO second question about UTPR. you have REALLY good conversational comedic timing and in general the pace of your banter flows really well and the way u balance the exposition to characterizing/comedic bits is so legit. how do u go about constructing dialogue and do u have any tips for aspiring jokesters.

LOL THANK YOU MAGGIE I will answer your first wuesion once I get home so I can get on my puter and pull up my sketches but to answer this one...... it's literally just because I'm on that damn venture bros. is2g the humor of utpr is so venturepilled at least in the way scenes are constructed.

at the risk of overexplaining the jokes and not making them funny anymore, my main approach is to end every scene with a clear "punchline", which usually ends up being some sort of dry sardonic remark ("this isn't shelley"/ "it's wax, asshole") or otherwise being way too casual about something serious ("boys are soooo dramatic"/ "you got any smokes on you?" /"you should probably use the tub upstairs first though"/etc). i also just think it's really funny when people (and by people I mean prudence and angel) Yell At Each Other lol.

some other things that have helped me to keep in mind when writing dialogue:

the best way to make your dialogue sound like it's being spoken aloud is... to speak it aloud. I talk to myself. a lot. I run through it out loud and hearing it that way helps me figure out the most natural way a person would say it. this is one reason I'm so obsessed with finding the perfect voice casting for my characters cause I want to be able to hear things In Their Voice.

verbosity is the enemy. however many words I draft for a given conversation, like maybe half of them actually make it onto the page. first of all nobody wants to read all that, and second, in a comic there is simply NOT ENOUGH ROOM!!!! for that much speech on the page. once again I've watched a lot of the venture bros deleted scenes and director commentary tracks on the dvds and D&J are CONSTSNTLYYY talking about how much material they have to cut for a given episode. it's true that "half of writing is rewriting" but the other half is just deleting shit.

I . hate. monologuing. rapid back-and-forth is what it's all about. nobody in real life allows someone to just dump paragraphs of information on them without interrupting. (the angel's monologue is an exception obviously because it was the setup to the joke that it wasn't actually talking to anyone at all)

on that note I LOVE having characters interrupt each other I also think it's so funny. messy, ineffective communication (IN FICTION!) is entertaining communication. another thing in this vein is characters talking PAST each other. not every line of dialogue has to be a direct or relevant response to the line that came before it. one person can ask a question, and the other person can brush past it and say something else without answering. another tv show I love recommending for its hyserically funny dialogue is the marvelous mrs. maisel. everyone please watch it it's so good and it does that kind of thing a lot

#meta

parkayquarts

I’m super curious about your writing process! Did you script the whole thing or are you working off an outline or are you just Following Your Heart? How long did the story sit in your head before you felt you were ready to make it into a comic?

YES OK. I do not actually WRITE any of it in a document or on a paper or anything like that I just think REALLY HARD about it. I do have a pretty solid mental outline for every chapter and the series as a whole as well as every individual scene, what order they appear in, ideas for panel/page composition, and so on, and I just run through those things over and over in my mind palace to refine and work out the kinks before the time comes to put them onto the page.

for most scenes I have dialogue worked out more or less word for word (my favorite Lying In Bed Trying To Fall Asleep Activity, naturally) and I've just kind of memorized it through repetition, but for some scenes it's a more vague "this is what needs to be communicated here" and then I figure out the particular wording during the thumbnailing stage (I do all of the speech bubbles at the same time as the sketches to make sure the composition accomodates both).

I only started working on the comic in earnest once I had a strong mental play-by-play of the first two chapters as you see them now. the premise of those chapters was only something I had started cooking up in the vaguest sense after I physically gave birth to oleander with my real human body a year and a half ago. for literal Years it was just prudence and the angel, and I had no idea what to actually do with them; a third character was necessary to actually get a Story going.

I think the actual turning point for me from "this is a series of loosely connected concepts I came up with" to "I can actually write an entire coherent story around this" was when inspiration struck me to draw these pieces and write the accompanying articles. that post is still pretty accurate to what I have planned in the future, but like 80% of the details of how I was going to get from point A to point B took shape concurrently while I was actively drawing the first chapter. It also helped a lot that this first conceptual post was so well received and all my amazing and beautiful friends and mutuals and followers were hyping it up, because it demonstrated that if I actually did take the plunge and start a full-length project, there would in fact be an audience for it and I wouldn't just be sinking hours and hours into something nobody but me cared about.

I have most of utmost prudence's plot down pat by now, but even with chapter 2 under my belt I'm still getting ideas for extra scenes to add later. they usually wouldn't have much impact on the overall narrative, but would help strengthen what I've already come up with. I've spent a lot of time imagining the lives and backstories of these characters in isolation, so it's ultimately a question of how much of those musings to include or not include as part of the final linear narrative. there's not really many examples I can give right now cause they are in later chapters sawryyyyy.

#meta #<- tag for me talking about technical stuff

stop omg what is this dude. you are seriously so underrated utmost prudence needs some publicity NOW cause. insnae

this scared me so bad for a sec I thought I did something wrong 😭 THANK YOU I REALLY APPRECIATE IT!!!! remember everyone make sure to tell all your friends and family and enemies about utpr ☝️🤓

#inbox