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Tree ref courtesy of finishing this page while looking out the window on the train from Seattle to Portland.
The title of this page and the previous one is a reference to Rush’s song “Red Barchetta “. What’s your favorite song about COOL CARS WHAT GO FAST VROOM VROOM?
Also holy cow this is page #92. This is getting close to being the biggest thing I’ve ever done.
So! It’s Thursday and you are not seeing a comic. You’re also not seeing a “sorry no comic” drawing because those are, IMHO, a really bad idea – they drain the energy one could use for pushing the next page forward to SOME degree, and ruin the flow when reading through the archives.
What happened? Well, I went to Furlandia this past weekend. Got Thursday’s page finished and uploaded on the train down, but I spent the train back home to Seattle just reading a book because I needed to unwind after spending a weekend selling, then a day and a half chilling in my friend’s very cat-inhabited apartment. Concrud plus allergies do not make for a happy brain.
Then Wednesday when I opened up Illustrator to work on the next page I realized I was at a point where I really needed to do some scripting. I ended up writing rough script (and panel flow diagrams, and some little panel thumbnails) out to page 102, which is to say to the end of this current chapter. And starting to organize my thoughts on the next chapter, which will probably be the last one of book 2 – and even starting to think about how to lead into book 3 elegantly. Which is to say “with lots of glitches”.
I should be able to get another page in the can this weekend, and then hopefully get back on track again! It’s a LOT easier to draw comics when you know what the heck’s supposed to happen on the page at hand.
Also, some things of interest: by request, you can now buy a big poster of the Vesta space station, and also by request, here is a desktop-sized copy of the previous page. I should really make a “desktop images” category at some point!
And ALSO here is a signal boost: want a copy of the latest volume of Girl Genius? And maybe some perks? Go here and do that Kickstarter thing. The Foglios are a huge influence on me; Rita would still probably exist without ‘Buck Godot‘ and ‘Girl Genius‘, but it would be a very different-looking beast.
Just a quickie post here. I’m working on getting some pages into the queue, you should be seeing Chapter X in a couple weeks.
I’m also up for “Best New Talent” in the Stumptown Comics Arts awards. The voting closes at noon on the 22nd, so if you want to vote, now would be a good time.
I finally got around to setting up some kind of store! If you missed out on the Kickstarter but want a copy of the book, now you can order one here. It’s US$25 plus shipping – $3-10 depending on where you live.
(Or if you’d rather buy it in person, I’ll be at Further Confusion next weekend. And Emerald City Comic Con, and Anthrocon, later in the year.)
In the backer forms for the Rita kickstarter, I asked people who were getting a sketch what they wanted. A lot of people said “whatever”; a few people asked for my dragon self. Of those expressing a preference for a character from Decrypting Rita, here’s the statistics:
Rita1 (blue, robot): 5
Rita2 (red, human): 1
Rita3 (orange, dragon): 5
Rita4 (green, Timelord): 0
Barrett3 (orange, elf): 1
Also there was one vote for whatever, maybe either Rita1, or maybe Rita3 because they figure I’ll be drawing a lot of Rita1.
NOBODY LOVES MY GALIFREYAN FAN CHARA WAAAAAAHHH but about 1/4 of the people who didn’t specify A Particular Rita or something else entirely will probably get her!
It looks like all the drawings are going to be on the inside back cover. That and the inside front cover are the only places I could actually find any white space to draw in. So when you get your signed-and-drawn-in book, don’t be disappointed when the flyleaf just has a signature!
Books books books books booksbooksbooks books!
Boooooks!
SQUEEE
happy happy happy
All the gloss came out pretty much as planned, too! It’s not quite as intense as it was on the Silicon Dawn – different process, I guess. Hopefully I can bump it up some for the second volume, the second run of this, and the ultimate omnibus. But wait until you see the technical diagram of Rita in the back… magical.
Now to start signing and drawing in them where needed, and getting them into the mail along with those robot lady prints! If you missed out on the Kickstarter and want a copy, drop me a line. $25 plus $3 shipping via Paypal, $20 if you’re outside North America. Eventually I’ll get a store up to automate this.
Rita: The next page is in progress. I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks dealing with cons, and trying to get various other things out of my way. And to get my schedule rearranged with less sitting around feeling dopey and more drawing.
I think the next page is about 1/3 done. I’m also thrashing out the script for the next few pages of the blue thread; the story’s changing gears and I want to make sure the transition is smooth.
The book: This morning, there was e-mail from my printer telling me they’re ready to ship, and if I could give them one last bit of data they needed in the next hour they could have it on the road today. Sadly I didn’t see this until about three hours after they sent it. So the books should be on their way Monday! Then I get to start signing and shipping them. And pulling together those prints I promised to go along with ‘em, too.
I have made several mistakes during the production of this book. Unsurprising, given that it’s my first try – it’s not entirely my first book, but I don’t think “printed about 50 copies of Absinthe via Lulu” really counts. I may be making some more before all is said and done. But hopefully I’ll manage to avoid making most of them for the next collection of Rita, and for the short story anthology I’m putting together! I’m quite sure there will be exciting NEW mistakes for those projects…
If all goes well I’ll have a few copies of the book at APE. Which will be my first time there. Hopefully I’ll make some new fans!
So what with one thing and another (Foolscap this past weekend, Rainfurrest this coming weekend, unexpectedly hosting a guest for RF for a few days this weekend, going back and forth on the final proofs of the Rita book), I suspect the number of Rita pages that will happen this week is zero. I’m gonna try to get something out anyway but if it’s not ready it’s just not ready.
But! If you would like a dose of my narrative and visuals, you can get it with this guest strip I did for ‘The End’. All you really need to know is that the human in two panels is the same person as the bird alien in the rest of the strip, though I would certainly recommend catching up on the rest of the story as well!
I won’t have Rita books at Rainfurrest, but I’ll be there with a bunch of Tarot decks and the usual prints and table commissions. I’ll also be doing a couple of panels – there’s the whirlwind tour of Illustrator that I do at pretty much every con (2pm Friday), and a webcomics Q&A panel with me, Dana Simpson, and Thomas Dye (5pm Saturday). Plus you might see me SHAKING MY BOOTY LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW at the dances, if I can find one that’s sufficiently glitchy to make my bottom happy. My bottom is very picky sometimes. Wait that sounds… oh never mind.
This nice review on IO9 (thanks, Lauren!) made me start wondering just which Rita people see as the real one, of whom all the other Ritas are dreams, shadows, or delusions. So here’s a little poll.
So here’s something that might be interesting – a Youtube original series called “DR0NE”, about a military combat robot in trouble.
Although one thing bugged me about it very quickly: in the protagonist’s view of the combat scenes, there are target reticules over both friendlies and enemies. These reticules are almost absolutely identical for both sides; the friendly ones are, to my eyes, MORE visually interesting because they have “FRIENDLY” written by them, while the enemies just have anonymous reticules.
Moreover, there’s a lot of scenes where the enemies are against a bright sky – and the white reticule is almost completely invisible against it. This is just some terrible information design.
So I guess this leads me to propose two theories of information overlay design:
1. Important information should be more prominent than unimportant information. In the example here of a combat HUD, for instance, the reticules over enemies should be much more noticeable than those over friendlies, which can be achieved by color, shape, and amount of detail.
2. Your HUD should always be visible over the world. If you want it to be all white as in this example (which I would not recommend, color is an important cue) then find SOME way to make your information appear over bright things – maybe a black outline behind it, maybe having mission-critical stuff blink between black and white, SOMETHING.
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot, since I’m constantly superimposing bits of Rita1′s HUD on the world. I do things like big gaudy triangles with exclamation points hovering over the heads of hostiles to make it a pretty unambiguous communication to both the reader and to Rita that HERE IS A VERY IMPORTANT THING, I’ll hint at color changes here and there – admittedly I’m constrained in that a lot by the abstracted nature of the comic; if I was doing more representational color, you’d definitely be seeing bright reds and yellows as cues for DANGER!!! and CAUTION!!.
I’m not entirely sure this little piece is worth critiquing – but heck, seeing it made me codify a couple of the unconscious rules I’d been applying in the comic, so I guess that’s good!
It’s also worth noting that this HUD is MARGINALLY better than the Terminator’s; here’s a compilation of all those scenes from Terminator 2. Notice how pretty much ALL the text overlays are out on the periphery of the screen, drawing your attention away from what’s happening? Bad, bad, bad design, at least from the point of view of “would this work for an enhanced human”.
(Also there is the plot hole where the drone is clearly shown to be able to see through walls now and then, but is then surrounded. I guess its heat-sensing camera takes power it doesn’t have? Or the environment it’s in before that is really IR-opaque? I dunno, it bugs me that they spend several shots establishing quite firmly that it can see through walls, then have him ambushed.)
