Taking a Few Steps Back: Adjusting the Script

Rohit p -

Welcome back everyone! I hope you guys enjoyed the previous two chapters for Atlas. I’m going forward with the third chapter’s storyboard and it will be out in the upcoming weeks. This chapter will introduce the main premise of the story. In addition, to get more practice with drawing these images, I used a small notebook to randomly select different manga panels to sketch out and ink (some of them are down below).

My notebook

This week, however, I had to take a few steps back to review the script for my comic. Apart from only writing lines of dialogue and describing scenery, I added reference images that would help me when I would storyboard the scenes in the story, including manga panels, backgrounds, visual effects, anatomical figures, and others. 

As I was drawing more of Marcus’s journey after his shocking encounter in Chapter 2, I realized there were some changes I needed to make to the script to make the story flow more smoothly. When I first created this script one year ago, I just threw down whatever lines the characters should say without thinking too much about any symbolism or any description of the atmosphere in the plot. However, once I came back after cutting down some of the script as I created the storyboard, I had to create links between different plot points that I could set up later, creating a spider web of interconnected events in the story. What if I change this? How would this connect to that dialogue? Just by displacing one event in the plot’s timeline can create a bunch of new outcomes for different scenes to play out, so this way I kept exploring how I could change the story.

I’ll continue to work on the storyboard, but for what’s new to come, I’ll be creating a digitally-rendered cover for this story, so that’s something I’m looking forward to by the end of April. See you guys next week!

Part of my script; Credits: Gege Akutami, Jujutsu Kaisen, Volume 11 (August 3, 2021)

More Posts

Comments:

All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.

    jacob_p
    It's great to see your sketches, Rohit! I really like the Deku art. It is so interesting how much thought goes into connecting symbolism and themes throughout the story. I always thought it was something that came natural for some writers and I never considered that they put so much work into it. Going forward, I'll definitely look out for recurring themes and symbols and appreciate them more. When drawing and writing dialogue, do you ever struggle with perfectionism? If you do, are there any tricks you have to get past it?
    April 9, 2025 at 10:25 am - Reply
    dina_i
    Rohit, it’s great to see how you’re refining the story beyond just dialogue and visuals. Building those connections between plot points will definitely make the narrative feel more intentional and engaging. I also love your use of reference images, it feels like you’re setting a solid foundation for both the art and the storytelling. Excited to see how these changes shape the next chapter!
    April 9, 2025 at 11:05 am - Reply
    rohit_p
    Thank you for the compliment, Jacob (the MHA panel took me one or two days to sketch and ink). You're not wrong though, because when I first started this project and even while reading different comics, I always wondered how the authors could connect such specific events in their stories to each other so intricately. Eiichiro Oda, for example, mentioned some characters at the beginning of the One Piece storyline and came back to them after 10 long arcs later, and no one could expect it. Here's another way to think of it: a lot of Japanese manga have many English translations for their artworks. It takes weeks (or even months) for the publishers to have a finalized set of pages that are translated from Japanese. I want to try this with my story, but it's not like I can snap my fingers after writing the first draft and expect it to be perfect. Like that, even though I struggle with the perfectionism aspect of this project, I just keep practicing and adjusting it with many drafts.
    April 10, 2025 at 2:37 pm - Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *