Jack Titan, Version 3
“Transformation”
Webtoon Episode 1 of 4, 2018
Shortly after I’d finished Jack Titan’s first short story called “The Tomb of Mar-Tolok,” I came across a contest being run by Webtoon. I can’t really remember the details, and I didn’t win, but that’s not the point. Completing the next Jack Titan story was all that mattered, and I had an absurdly short period of time within which to do so.
I remember that each pitch had to consist of at least 4 episodes, and each episode had to contain at least 32 panels. The problem was that I discovered this contest when there were only 30 days remaining on the deadline.
This is the first post, and where the mad scramble began.
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I’m reposting the Webtoon work over the next few pages, but you can also find it on their site.
I am so proud of this work.
Again, it could have been better. They can always be better. But what pros do is ship, and I worked my tail off to ship this one. I had zero time to complete the necessary panels, so throughout the entirety of this run I was basically inking straight to the page. Because of that, there’s a genuine energy to the drawing and pacing that is impossible to replicate otherwise. Seeing these pages puts me right back at my drawing table while I slashed ink across page after page of Bristol board.
I was also excited for the format. Webtoon is an app designed specifically for reading comics on phones, so the flow is narrow and infinitely scrollable. Therefore, no double-page spreads, but you can control pacing with moments of quiet white space and by turning those “double page moments” into longer, vertical scenes impossible to replicate in printed form. I didn’t want to post traditional comic pages into the app and call it a day—I wanted to embrace the format to see what I could do with it. An example from this first episode is when the titan transforms midair and crash lands in front of Jack and his crew. In reality, that scene consisted of me taping three 11x17 inch boards together to make it possible. Truth be told, I worked way too large for this format and could have saved a ton of time by working at a more reasonable size, but like I said at the top, I wasn’t thinking—I was too busy moving as fast as humanly possible.
In total, all four Webtoon episodes of Jack Titan added up to 55 sheets of 11x17 Bristol. Then I scanned and colored everything in Photoshop. The whole process took me 30 days. It was exhilarating.
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The big thing to note here story-wise is that Jack’s crew rounded out. He finally had a respectable team in Kimmy and Winslow. There’s also internal friction within Jack himself regarding his status as a titan—something he rejects for unknown reasons. Again, my time was limited and the story is basic, so I was looking for ways to make Jack’s world feel bigger by adding hints of his past and allowing the reader to fill in gaps on their own. When in doubt, plant some seeds and wait until later to figure it out.