Book 1, Page 157

Ta-daa!

The Photoshop file for this page has about 20 layers of sketched chairs, tables, and figures. This was one of those pages where I just scoot everything around til it looks right. In the screenshot below, you can see MOST of the layers I was working with.

Here's Barry's script for this page:

This page is a large splash panel with small inserts. We could also do this as two pages in a row showing the scene, if you want.

PANEL 1 Sticks slaps her palm against her forehead in a frustrated gesture.

PANEL 2 Sticks looks back up at what’s happening around her.

INSET PANEL The business end of a broom sweeping up some broken glass.

INSET PANEL A hand raised into the air, holding a champagne glass, a little champagne spilling over the side with the movement. Or it can be several hands toasting, one with a beer mug, one with a beer bottle, and one or two with champagne flutes.

INSET PANEL Hands playing on the piano.

INSET PANEL Close up of someone sipping wine or champagne out of a policeman’s hat.

PANEL 3 A full page panel of women celebrating their victory, laughing and drinking. Most of them are smoking.

I’m just going to throw a bunch of suggestions here, which you can use or not as you think is best. And these could all be in either the main panel or in inserts (or just skipped). (And the same for the inset panels mentioned above). Some things we might see:

Three of the bar’s staff - the waitress who slammed a cop with her tray, the hostess from when Sticks first entered the bar many pages ago, and one of the singers - toasting their victory. Two are toasting with glasses, one is toasting with the bottle.

Mona performatively models a police hat as if it were haute couture while Ruth and Kansas laugh.

Someone pouring wine or champagne into a second policeman’s hat.

A few people, including the two women we saw dancing just before the cops arrived, doing a conga line dance.

A butch woman has taken off her outer shirt and is now in a tank top, holding out an arm that a femme woman is wrapping an ace bandage around. The butch has a black eye and is chatting cheerfully (they both seem cheerful).

A couple of women pick up a table that had been toppled to the floor (doesn’t have to be Sticks’ table).

PANEL ?

This should be the final inset panel, near the bottom right.

A close up of Lillian, similar to panels 1 and 2, showing Lillian being amazed.

CAPTION: It was something I’d never seen before.

As you can see, we decided to cut the last panel. I liked leaving most of the page open for the reader's eye to wander around. But I'd been looking forward to giving everyone a good look at the inside of Moira's for a long time! Come to think of it, if we're following Lillian's point of view, it doesn't technically make sense for us to see the ballroom from the center of the room, several feet in the air. But this seemed like the best way to fit most of the room into a tall panel.

I read that vaulted ceilings are a good way to make a room appear taller. That's handy, because this room definitely looks bigger than you'd expect from the exterior I drew on the previous page! Looking back at Gladys Bentley's performance on page 121, it seems that the stage and dance floor at Moira's can magically expand to accommodate the crowd.

I had a pretty clear mental image of the ballroom at Moira's--swoopy ceilings, metal accents, and wall sconces--but it isn't modeled after a particular building. As I was drawing it, I realized things like "Oh dear--If the double-doors by the stage lead to the kitchen, the poor wait staff will have to maneuver around a bunch of swing dancers all night!" and "How do the metal accents on the wall actually fit against the ceiling?...Well, if this ever gets made into a movie, that'll be someone else's problem."

You might remember these reference photos from an earlier post about Moira's...

...but I haven't found a photo that matches the details of Moira's. I'm not sure where I got the idea for the ceiling. Maybe there's a famous ballroom or theater that looks like that, and I forgot about it. Or maybe I was thinking of the Hollywood Theatre in Portland? (I miss that place!) 

These crowd scenes are fun, but time-consuming! They involve making sure all the action fits on the page, then looking through earlier pages to see which background characters can make a reappearance, then getting reference photos for a bunch of the poses, and then realizing that you don't know what brooms and conga lines and First Aid kits looked like in 1941, and THEN spending half an hour (oops) flipping through an old Sears catalog collection to choose the perfect hat for the smoker in the foreground.

Here are some reference photos from the picking-up-a-table panel:

(Those slippers were a holiday present, the brand is called "Wild Ones," and they are my favorite!)

Thanks, as always, for your support on Patreon! Even $1/month means a lot. I hope you enjoy these peeks behind the scenes!

-Becky