Grant & Chase — artist brief

The two leads

Same office, same era, same city. Whoever's case it is, narrates it and solves it.

Dr. Tracy Grant

An early-career scientist who runs the studies. Competent, tired, does her own legwork at eleven at night. Her cases are about method and rigor.

Her desk nameplate reads DR. TRACY GRANT — the title stays on.

Connie Chase

The study coordinator. Works the board, the phones, the roster — the half of the job Tracy never sees. Dry, warm, faster-talking.

Her plate reads CONSTANCE CHASE, with no title. That contrast is deliberate.

The one rule about the nameplate

The captions are first person and never say the narrator's name, so panel 1 has to show whose case it is. Put the nameplate somewhere legible in the opening panel, and echo it in the closing panel where the shot mirrors the opening.

The frosted door reads GRANT & CHASE — PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATIONS. Recurring props: the cold coffee, the venetian blinds, the nameplate, a fat file folder.

The page

Six panels is the default. Nine when the page needs the room.

Six panels, 3 across × 2 down — or nine, 3 × 3, where the script says so.
The rows are acts. The story turns on a row break, never mid-row, and the last row is the bright one. That's why the grid matters: the eye carriage-returns into the light.
Noir dissolves partway down the page. Roughly the first half is full noir — hard shadow, blind-stripes, deep blacks. One hinge panel where color first appears. Then the rest is bright, ordinary daylight with no detective anywhere in the frame.
The resolution is second-to-last; the last panel is the aside. Don't put the emotional payoff in the final frame — it lands one earlier, and the last panel is quieter.
Flashback pages get a double frame, a warmer sepia wash, and a yellow place-and-time tag in the corner. Present-tense panels are single-framed, cool, untagged. Don't age the character between rows — signal the gap with hair, glasses, a messier desk.

The look

Two colors: black and white, plus the brand purple. Nothing else, ever. Cheaper to draw, ages better, and legible at thumbnail size.
The purple is the product. No color appears anywhere on the page until the software does. The hinge panel's glow is the only color in its frame — usually a phone or a monitor lighting someone's face.
Keep real interfaces out of the panels. The only screen content should be a single line of text — a notification, a number. A page tied to a screenshot rots the moment the product changes.
Noir is dread, not darkness. A closing night scene can be soft moonlight with no stripes and still belong to the bright row.

Lettering

Two voices, standard comics grammar, nothing more.

Narration

Typewriter face on aged paper, so it reads as a case file. Carries the monologue and every bad metaphor.

Sixty subjects. Twelve weeks.

Dialogue

Hand-lettered comic face in balloons — a Blambot face is fine for production. This is real life puncturing the monologue.

Hey — everything okay?

Palette

#1c1c1e

#8a8a90

#621a8f

#e5cdf8

#f9f3fd

#e8e3d4

Finished storyboards

Each one is a full page, panel by panel, with the copy and the art direction for that specific case. This is what you'd be working from.

The Quiet Participant → The Invisible Line → The Perfect Delivery → The Stacked Deck →

Questions this brief doesn't answer — how the jokes are built, why the cases were chosen, how the companion radio drama works — live in the standing rules, alongside the Casebook and the leads. You don't need any of it to draw a page, and some of it applies only to the audio side, so read it out of curiosity rather than duty.