When I'm drawing characters I've gotten the hang of I can fly through panels. Layout, pencil, ink, no problem. But when you suddenly have to introduce a dozen new characters, species, architecture, etc, it slows you down dramatically. In this case it was also mostly that I DIDN'T KNOW what needed to be in there. I'm still 7 pages away from having to draw some of these characters so I have time to flesh them out and practice drawing them.
So I'd end up drawing a piece of the panel, ink it, erase the pencil, and then try to figure out how to use the rest of the space. It probably took me 3 days of stop and go effort to just get it finished! For perspective, pages 7-8 took me a day each to do completely, pencil, ink, scanned, and lettered. Ouch!
In my defense I did spend a few hours coloring the first page of Issue #1 to see how it looked, and I'm fairly certain that a color version of the book would look a lot better than a B&W one, at least for most audiences. So we'll see. Maybe if a publisher hops on board with the book I'll have to spend time coloring all of it...
For now, here's a sneak panel from page 9
