Stray Flights #1: Desiccate, Page 4

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EDIT:  Okay, this is not a mistake that this page is posted twice.  There's a lesson here:  See that top page?  That is how I've normally been uploading images.  The colors are muted and NOT AT ALL as they were in Photochop when I colored the page.  The page below is much closer (but not exactly) to the intended colors.  See the explosion is much more saturated?  All of the pages I've uploaded so far have been washed out and I finally realized the reason why.  I was using the Photochop color profile, not the web color profile.  Simple fix and now we're facing the right way in the saddle.  I pledge to thee that all images henceforth will be uploaded correctly.

Good Morning, good morning.  'Desiccate' page four has arrived and with it, an answer to why our dear wanderer is in the desert in the first place.  Something I was really trying to accomplish with the pages in this story was a kind of washed-out, beat up texture pervading everything.  I think it was pretty successful, using paint textures applied over the flat coloring of the pages.  It's not necessarily a technique I'd use for a larger project but I think it ended up suiting this story nicely and it might turn up in another Stray Flight in the future.  Other minor aspects I'm pleased about:  the way the background desert falls away, blurred as it is, and the explosion.  Funnily enough, when I first colored the explosion in Photochop it looked too realistic, it brought too much attention to itself.  I ended up applying a bunch of filters to it to try to knock down the edge and make it more graphic looking.

This brings me to an important point:  I wonder what everyone thinks of this.  I've noticed along the way, through my perambulations and perusals of comics and graphic novels that often, not always, but often, the more realistic the artwork is, the more staged/stilted it ends up looking, and the more it might take the reader out of the story.  Notable exceptions to this are Ex Machina (Vaughn and Harris) and Moonshadow (DeMatteis and Muth), which I ADORE.

I mean, something that looks silly, but I know is relatively popular in other countries are those photo graphic novels, where it's a stack of film stills or photos comprising the story, with word balloons pointing around.  Does anyone like those?  I just find them to be so lackluster.

Also, please check out Andrew Bosley's Brainstormer, that's where I cooked up the idea for this Stray Flight.