The lack of gutter makes conversations play very shot-reverse-shot, but it isn’t too dry. The first five panels of chapter 1 go from large to medium to small back to medium and large again, ending on image of Elli in full lazyboy mode. The lack of a gutter makes it so scale comes through panel width and the rhythm created by shifting sizes one after another. Reading strips vertically it’s about negotiating the right amount of space separating panels, here there isn’t any separation. The comic begins with a series of establishing shots before hitting a complete stop as Elli takes a seat. There is a similar frictionless quality to it, since holding the down arrow is no different than the right arrow, but the scale and arrangement is different.
Immediately the change in reading orientation brings a clear shift in how the art is formatted. The inverse lettering for Stein also helps. “Blood Stain” is at it’s core a workplace comedy about playing assistant to a Mad Scientist, who maybe more Mad (both in terms of craze and anger) than Science! Sejic plays with this idea in the first conversation between Elliot and Stein, by fulling leaning into the creepy scientist expectations. The first four strips in “Blood Stain” chapter one deal in Elliot looking for a job, and coming across a creepy ad for a lab tech. The content of each strip isn’t exactly one to one between DA and Line/Tapas, but that isn’t off by that much. The Line and Tapas strips use the art and lettering found in the Top Cow collections, and feature minor alterations to fit the vertical reading orientation. This is also the original art and lettering.
The DA strips are all read horizontally, like proper newspaper strips, which is a change of pace. For the purposes of this read through, we’ll be looking at the original strips on her DeviantArt page (which is the titled link.) Going to the source will provide some interesting differences. Schedule: Once a Week on Line/Tapas otherwise currently on hiatusĪ note before diving into this, “Blood Stain” by Linda Sejic has now been syndicated on to three web platforms besides the collected publications.
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