Heroes for Hire page 2

I've been away longer than I had hoped but I finally have page 2 of the Heroes for Hire sample pages I'm working on ready for posting.  It's been done for a number of days now but I've held off posting it here because something was just a bit off.  There are things about the page I like and things I don't like.  That's pretty usual.  But something about the page was bugging me just enough that I had to let it sit for awhile.  I finished making some changes tonight and I am happier with the page now than I was before.  Here's the "finished" product:

The thing that was off (well, the one that was bugging me anyway) was the first panel.  If you've read any of my previous entries you'll know this is part of a class I took from comicsexperience.com.  Part of our assignment was to create a series of thumbnails for each page.  Our instructor, Robert Atkins, offered some feedback and advice on the thumbs and, as was the case here, chose the panels he felt were "best" for the final page.

As you can see, the final page was an amalgam of a couple of different thumbnail images.  I'm glad he chose the final panel of the first image because I think that was definitely a fun panel.  It's also the one I thought would be the most difficult.  It wasn't.

I think the thumbnail sketch of what would become panel one was fairly good.  And fairly easy to come up with.  But a tricky aspect of a panel like this is making sure that the people in the image stay true to the perspective of their surroundings.  If things We'd already seen the door that Punisher was standing near so I didn't want to just show that from a different angle.  I wanted to make sure we saw more of this weird room that this scene is taking place in.  Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job of capturing the "energy" of the thumbnail on the finished page.  I tried to keep the same size ratio between Misty and the Punisher while also keeping the perspective angle I liked.  The problem was, it just wasn't going to work to have them lined up exactly within the perspective I chose while keeping the size ratio.  But instead of trying to work something out I tried to force the issue.  Here's how the panel originally looked:

It probably doesn't look too much different than the final version above.  However, Punisher's body and arm are pretty much completely in line with the perspective of the background.  And, maybe I'm wrong, but it makes him look like he's aiming to the right of Misty Knight.  either that or she's a giant and sitting down.  It just looks wrong.  But it didn't look wrong enough that I gave up on it right away.  I actually posted it to my deviantART account and wanted to see if anyone agreed with me.  I didn't post it to any groups or anything like that and I don't have enough watchers to just happen to see this offer up advice.  I thought about being more aggressive on seeking feedback but figured I was already going to make some changes so I figured I would hold off until then.  I think the new version is better but I'm not convinced that the problem has been resolved.

Hopefully I'll have the next page up shortly.  I've been in a bit of a drawing funk here recently but I think I've been able to get past it.  I'll be posting more about these issues in my next installment.