How A Popular Smash Musical Influenced Steamroller Man!
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Issue One, Page Ten
This week’s post continues my From The Archives series, where I revisit one of my earlier pages and provide some insight on its creation. I’m going in chronological order, so that those of you who have just discovered the comic can get caught up!
If I had to pick a favorite page in the whole musical sequence I’ve been revisiting in recent weeks, it would be this one.
In fact, I liked it so much, I put it on a t-shirt!
Back in 2018 when I made this page, I had just discovered the musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and like thousands of other fans, was fascinated and delighted by the clever lyrics and song arrangements. There was one part in the song My Shot that I particularly liked, and which directly influenced what I was trying to convey with this page.
If you’re unfamiliar with the musical, My Shot comes early in the show, as Alexander Hamilton, freshly arrived in New York, meets some other characters. He sings to them about how he is determined to make his mark on his new home, to the point of fomenting revolution against the British! It’s a brash, boisterous and propulsive number, building up to the point where Hamilton realizes he’s causing a scene and talking a little too loudly. At this point, the beat cuts out, the music cuts out, and Miranda breaks the silence with this, acapella:
Oh, am I talkin' too loud?
Sometimes I get overexcited, shoot off at the mouth
I never had a group of friends before
I promise that I'll make y'all proud
After a silent beat, another character yells “Let’s get this guy in front of a crowd!” and the music swells back, with the entire chorus joining the song for the big finish.
It’s a great moment, and I think what makes it work so well is the contrast between the music and the silence. I wanted to try something similar in Steamroller Man’s song, but how could I achieve a similar effect in the soundless medium of comics?
For contrast, I needed to make this page look as different from the preceding pages of the musical number as I possibly could.
So, where the previous pages were multi-panel pages, this one was a single, full-bleed image occupying the entire page. Where the lyrics were all in word balloons on the previous pages, the lyrics here are free-floating. I felt that presenting the text this way also changed the tone of voice, reading more like an internal monologue. The heavy use of black on this page also provided perhaps the biggest element of visual contrast to the previous pages. Finally, making this page an even-numbered page meant that the reader had to turn the page to see it. This allowed me to use one of my favorite tools in comics, the Page Turn Reveal, to add the maximum impact possible to this page!
The lyrics featured on this page didn’t really contain a joke, but I wanted to add something funny to the image. I came up with the idea of something like those “awkward family portrait” images with the spectral image of a person floating above the actual person in a physical space, like this sort of thing:
I don’t know if anyone got the reference, but most of the time I’m just trying to amuse myself, anyway.
Strangely enough, when I went back to the digital file for Page Ten, I could not find any art process stuff to show! I can only guess that I must have deleted the preliminary work, for some reason. Oh well!
I hope you enjoyed this week’s look back at an early page! Thanks for reading and subscribing!
Keep Rolling!
Matt
Ha! Love the ’70s portrait inspiration. Wonderful.