Well, that's Lethality License.

It's somewhat of a mess of ideas; it tries to say something about justice, biases, gun ownership, capital punishment, among a lot of other stuff, but it didn't have the courage to really delve into each of those ideas.

Not too proud of how the story turned out, but I've already made peace with the fact that Lethality License, being the second story I've ever finished, won't amount to all that much. I kinda HAD to make peace with that fact because not making peace with the fact that my works will be shitty for a while is why it took me this long to finish a second story despite wanting to call myself a writer.

What I am decently happy with are the visuals. I chose a monochrome style to make things a little easier for myself as this is my first ever comic project, so I didn't really know what to expect.

Surprisingly, the biggest problem I had was with canvas sizes and page layouts. If I make the canvas too small, there won't be enough room for panels, and if they're too big some panels may have to be disproportionally big to fill the negative space. And once I found a canvas size I was confident with (though I did change the canvas size again around page 3), the problem then became "How many panels do I put on this page, and how to I arrange them?"

I knew that there was an art to choosing and arranging panels on a page. One example is how Junji Ito's mangas have some pages end with suspenseful set ups, with the big reveal panel on the other side of the page, basically creating jumpscares in book form. You can see me attempt this too, with most pages ending in some kind of cliffhanger. (Though it doesn't really work here, as every page is in one big vertical line, so no suspenseful page turns here.)

Eventually, I decided to work in rows instead, to quell my indecision. A page can be any arrangement of any number of panels, but a row can only be like 2 panels next to each other. Though, this did result in some problems. Namely, the pages aren't uniform in height. While most pages have 2 rows of panels, some have 3, depending on how long it took to get to the stuff I can use as mini cliffhangers to end a page on.

Anyways, as far as stepping stones go, this is pretty decent for a second work. It's pretty good for my first comic project as well. At times, I kinda sorta regret not having my first comic project be something small and inconsequential, like a gag-per-day comic or whatever, but in the end I don't regret diving straight into this shit with something like Lethality License.

Here's to more finished works from me.