I started page 2 with much less certainty than page 1, and in fact at this point hadn’t even realized that the entire story was going to be laid out with strong vertical panels. This is something I try and teach my students–and you can see evidence of this here and a total contradiction of this principal in page 1–which is that they need to do many thumbnails and iterations as their first idea probably sucks or is at the very least more likely than not merely a half-idea. In fact, this thumbnail really only covers one idea from page 2, “I had fallen to agnosticism,” the rest of this page became page 3.

On the left is the image for page 5, on the right is the first serious layout for page 2. Here you can see strong vertical panels established, a layout theme that will repeat. Notice that the left and right panels are broken into two smaller panels. Additionally the two panels on the far right ultimately moved to the next page.

This layout is very similar to the above though by now I had realized the strong diagonal elements that would run across page, see the line across the bottom that shows that this strong diagonal would lead to me in all three columns. The three circular shape across the top do the same.

This central panel ultimately moved to this page while the other panels made up page 4.

This, again, is from the little ashcan version of this that I worked out with Tom Hart at SAW, and in fact it was largely this page that caused me to need to create the ashcan to finally get all the right panels in all the right places on all the right pages.  The strong diagonals were important to me and you can see that I maintained them with the flow of images of me going downward diagonally across the bottom as well as the void, moon, and Saraswati portrait moving upward across the the panels at the top. You can see here that the column on the left is still broken into two panels.

This is the final page, as it is still not inked it is nowhere near compleat. Here you can see the strong diagonals and also the Yantra-like repetition of the circular shape that carries across all three panels. This Yantra was now like the strong vertical panels, a consistent design theme that would carry through each page. Additionally you can see that ultimately I chose to let the first panel become one rather than two, an element that I had not even considered until I had started drawing the final page… though looking at it now it seems terribly inevitable.