MAZEBOOK Out This Week!

The Maze Within The Maze

The collected hardcover edition of my most recent graphic novel, MAZEBOOK came out this week so I thought I would share some process material from one of my favourite parts of the whole story. One of the best parts of working on this book was being able to play with the visual potential of mazes in my actual storytelling. You’ll likely have noticed a number of pages and panels that reflect this.

In this new sequence Will enters the world or the maze, hidden within the streets of the city, and begins travelling through it. I wanted this to feel big and important in the story and early on I got the idea to actually have the panels of each page connect to the next page so that if the pages were all laid out the layouts would actually create a maze shape. Executing this idea was a challenge for sure, but honestly a really fun one. I used big sheets of paper with rough layouts and had them scattered across my studio floor trying to figure out how to make it work. This is the kind of fun, experimental stuff that you can only do if you are drawing something yourself and can really just play.

Knowing these pages would create a maze shape if pulled out and laid side by side is sort of a fun extra element to the book. I think the sequence would still work fine if you never made these connections, but I do think this sort of stuff in really using layouts and the language of comics to accentuate the themes of a story makes for a deeper read (even if a reader only picks up on it subconsciously).

Anyways, this was definitely one of the most labour intensive but also most fun sequences of comics I ever got to draw. I hope you all enjoyed these process pics and the finished original art laid out on my studio floor.

See you in the maze!

-Jeff