Omfg chapter X of Decrypting Rita is FINALLY DONE. If you want to catch up then go back to here to read the whole chapter. At 17 pages, it’s the longest one so far, and probably the longest one in the entire story – I’ve got most of book 3 planned out and nothing looks to be anywhere near this long.
This also means that it’s probably time to get moving on the Kickstarter. There’s one more chapter in book 3, but it’s about eight pages, with a fairly low panels-per-page count (especially compared to the last few pages of this one, which ranged from 7-12 panels per page), so I should have no problems getting it done during the month-long span of a campaign. I also want to do some editing to a few things in this last chapter, and of course there’s going to be a pass of considering where spot gloss belongs.
In other Rita news, yesterday I dropped by Phoenix Comics in Capitol Hill. It’s run by some friends of mine, who’d asked for a few copies of Rita last month; turns out the last of the three copies had just sold a couple days ago, and they wanted more! So I’ll be dropping off four more sometime soon.
Also here is a cool thing: Jim Steranko did a comics adaptation of the 1981 SF movie “Outland”. It ran in Heavy Metal over six months, then was collected – but only in France. He drew it almost entirely in double-page spreads, with lots of huge drawings balanced against rows of smaller ones. If I’d seen this before starting Rita, I might have done some different panel rhythms – and I still might swipe from it for the final volume. Which is kind of coming full circle; the initial flash of Rita climbing up the side of a building, rendered very starkly and bluely, came when I was in the shower after reading an article talking about the first issue of Steranko’s run on “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD”. I guess maybe if I ever run into him at a con I should say “hey thanks for the inspiration” and pass him a copy or something.