I mentioned back in February in my Kirby: Chilly Reception process post that I had written another short Kirby story I’d be covering soon. I started posting it in January and come April 28th I finally posted the last page. Now, let’s talk about it!
Right after I finished Chilly Reception in October, the very next month I began writing Meta Knight wants to Battle. This was going to be another comedic comic with a simple concept: Meta Knight wants to fight, but can’t get the battle he really wants.
Where Chilly Reception was done with a style in mind to keep things simple and fast in a comic strip format, this time I wanted to take my time on both backgrounds and characters in an format similar to manga.
I spent November to December sketching out all sixteen pages of MKWtB. This was a self imposed challenge for myself, as usually I’ll get a couple pages sketched, get those pages ready to post, then spend the remainder of the comic having to sketch out and finish the rest of the pages weekly. I wanted to try waiting until all of my pages were sketched before getting a couple ready to post, then all I have to do is ink and color the rest. Sketching for me is the longer process, so this help cut out a ton of time in the long run.
After all my pages were sketched, I set out working on the comic cover.
I looked at some Kirby manga comic covers for inspiration on what the cover should look like. I though of having the two other stars of the comic, Kirby and Galacta Knight, looming above Meta Knight, but didn’t end up going with it. I liked the composition, but it didn’t really reflect the comic itself properly.
What I did go with was MK jumping in the air with a determined look, with Kirby and Galacta watching on.
I colored in the characters and background. I felt like keeping the background lineless would help frame the characters better.
After some shading and a title, the cover was done!
I already had all the comic sketches done, so all I had to do was ink and color some buffer pages and the rest from there. Here are all the sketches.
I mostly wanted to experiment with composition and storytelling with this comic. Some pages ended up having panels too close together, so it was a learning process.
Next are all the completed pages. Since Chilly Reception was done in black and white, I wanted to go all out with colorful pages.
This was a very fun comic to work on and I’m happy with the result! Short comics lend themselves well to experimentation and learning techniques to bring over to bigger stories. I’m currently in the process of drawing another comic, Pac-Man: Ghost Gamble, that I’ll be covering the first part of once I’m finished.
Until then, thank you for reading!