This is probably the only time you will ever see me drawing perfectly symmetrical figures. Symmetry is deadening, and I like everything to be lively. But nobody’s inhabiting these four chassis right now; they should look just as alive as your clothes hanging in the closet. Their subsentient systems are keeping them standing and balanced, but there’s no mindcore there to turn them into a person.
Last page of chapter 21! First page of chapter 13! Double posted because it’s in both of them!
If you were supporting me on Patreon you could see a high-res copy of the last panel of this page! Or me waffling on about how me getting obsessive about the backgrounds lately ties into the overarching themes of the comic!
Also I should mention that Henry is a cameo of Savage Henry, created by the ever-awesome and influential (on me at least) Matt Howarth! I think that is all! Also I am running out of exclamation points!
But not out of weed.
Oh wait! I found some more exclamation points! The name of Rita and Carol’s boss is glitched out because it’s going to be replaced with a Kickstarter 3 backer! Who will have a panel or three of appearing on-stage, as well!
Last page of chapter 21! First page of chapter 13! Double posted because it’s in both of them!
If you were supporting me on Patreon you could see a high-res copy of the last panel of this page! Or me waffling on about how me getting obsessive about the backgrounds lately ties into the overarching themes of the comic!
Also I should mention that Henry is a cameo of Savage Henry, created by the ever-awesome and influential (on me at least) Matt Howarth! I think that is all! Also I am running out of exclamation points!
But not out of weed.
Oh wait! I found some more exclamation points! The name of Rita and Carol’s boss is glitched out because it’s going to be replaced with a Kickstarter 3 backer! Who will have a panel or three of appearing on-stage, as well!
This page may feel familiar, too.
Man it feels so strange to be looking at finishing this comic in the foreseeable future. I’ve been working on it since 2011. We’re getting pretty close to the climax, though there’s still a few jumbled-sequence chapters to fill in everything I want you to know before it ends.
This page may look a little familiar!
This page may look slightly familiar…
Finished on the train to Portland and at my table at Furlandia.
Ughhhhh this page took beyond forever. I’m sure you can see why. I’m really glad I’ve made my peace with this; most advice on Making Comics On The Web tends to emphasize HAVE A SCHEDULE AND STICK TO IT COME HELL OR HIGH WATER but that advice also tends to come from strippers, who have a much more limited canvas to work on. (And hell, I’m sticking to my official schedule: “aim for two pages a week, don’t fret when that doesn’t happen”. Real life gets in the way, and so does making crazy detailed pages when the story demands it.)
Wanna see some progress shots from this page? Go here.
As with the previous EPIC PAGE, if you’re backing my Patreon campaign you get a high-res copy of that last panel.
I’m off to Portland for Furlandia, maybe I’ll see you there! The next page is a LOT simpler and might even get finished on the train down there.
Oh yeah, and this is the last page of chapter 16″.
It’s good to get back to the story; I’ve spent the last week on dealing with my printing mistake on book 2. And working on this spread. Though more the former than the latter.
Patreon supporters get a copy of this at like 500 percent of what it’s at on screen.
And while I’m suggesting places to put your entertainment money, let me direct you to this.
Open world parkour Jet Set Radio. By a French team. With music by the guy who did Jet Set Radio’s soundtrack. And occasional stealth bits. How can I not back this? This is the game I’ve been putting off learning enough 3D skills to make myself.
You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this big reveal. I’ve been planning it since page 1!
There is so much I could have done in the green world that I just don’t have the room to do in this story. All I can do is make a map and write some hopefully-evocative stuff on it.
Also! If you’re attending the Emerald City Comic-Con this weekend, be sure to drop by my table in the Artist’s Alley. I won’t have anything but book 1 of Rita and some prints to sell, because I was crazy sluggish this winter.
Folks who are supporting the comic on Patreon can see an unglitched version of this page here. Everyone else will have to wait something like 15-20 pages.
Aaand that’s the end of chapter 12. According to my notes there are eight left in the story, and some of them are pretty short.
So I was idly looking at some of the stuff currently advertising on Rita, and saw a very pink ad for “Mock Girl”. I instantly guessed what genre it was in: the Semi-Autobiographical Trans Narrative. It’s a difficult genre for me to love. Most instances of it tend to be boring in the same way I find any autobio boring, and it tends to be someone’s first effort at a Real Comic to boot – so they’re working uphill at something that’s already kinda difficult to get right in my eyes.
“Mock Girl” is doing it right.
The drawing is pretty much ‘serviceable’ to my jaundiced ex-animator eyes, but it’s enough to serve the writing. And the writing? Anything for a laugh. There’s some moments of seriousness, but mostly it giggles wildly from “vanished sister turns out to be an assassin” to “unexpectedly nice and helpful Creepy Clown” to “spooky magical voice from the darkness turns out to be a cranky turtle” and “while stuck in a coma talking to metaphors for her different drives, the main character’s Lust takes the time to crack wise about the size of her boobs”. The transition is an occasional subject for humor, but it’s completely normalized by the fact that it’s pretty much just one more thing to goof on.
Anyway. Go check it out.
The quilt covering Ordinary Human Rita was an interesting experiment with a corner of Illustrator I don’t use too much: distortion meshes. Well, okay, I use super-simple d-meshes all the time; pretty much every bit of hovering HUD text in this comic is in a d-mesh that’s had a perspective transformation applied to it. But this was my first time really trying to do complicated freeform distortions.
You can read more about it on my blog if you’re curious.
ALSO is it just me or there a lot of missing images when you look at this whole chapter?
You might be wondering why there weren’t any pages last week. That would be because I spent a lot of last work doing final approval and tweaks on the files for book 2 – the presses should be starting up soon, then I get to watch the books make their way from China to Seattle!
Holy cow you do not want to know how long the backgrounds in Fantasy World took. And the worst part of it is that I’m going to be using a completely different camera angle on the conversation for the next few panels – I’ll have to do another complex background to use for that before I can cut and paste stuff.
Or I could have some blank space behind them talking, but honestly I only want to do that if it’s actually appropriate to the setting. Future Rita’s apartment is blank because she has very few physical possessions and relishes empty space, so I’m fine with having that vast expanse of white wall on the top side! (Plus it seems to fit her mood, of wanting to shut down.)
Anyway! The next page is written and has its rough layout, so it’s very likely that you’ll see it next Tuesday.
Man I dunno about that page title. I’ve gotta fill it with something and I’m really just out of crypto jokes. So instead you get a Jethro Tull song that came up while I was posting this. I guess I could just do the page number (this is 120) but that’s really, really boring…
The dude having a quiet smoke in the left side of the lower right panel is Badou from Shirow Miwa’s “Dogs”, which I picked up at the library last week and am kinda quietly in love with. There’s some really solid cartooning going on in that book.
Anyway. This is the first page I’ve done since setting up a Patreon campaign, and thanks to the generosity of the folks who’ve pledged, my drink at the cartoonist meetup tonight will be paid for by this page. Huzzah! If you wanna help support this comic, and maybe give me a bit of a carrot to push myself to work more on it, then go check it out. Or you could keep enjoying it and maybe buy books when I print ’em, whatever, I’ll keep drawing it anyway.
I think this will probably be the only page for this week; I don’t have any sketches for the next page. I might have a wild fit of productivity tomorrow and take it from “loosely laid out dialogue” to “final art” but I’m not gonna count on it. I did actually spend three solid hours working on this, which is like three times more than I’ve been able to make myself do for most of the past few months, so you never know. I think spring may finally be coming! (Edit: I had a wild fit of productivity tonight while hanging out at SICAGA and got the next page roughed, holy crap. Lots of complex backgrounds in that one though, so who knows how long it’ll take..)
Aaand I also spent some time throwing together a Patreon campaign. I had a few people ask if I had one; now I do. Basically it’s an ongoing Kickstarter that will pay me per-page, for those of you who’d like to support me that way instead of (or in addition to!) buying a copy of the book about once a year. You can find out more here.
(I’m still going back and forth with the printer on contracts, this is just taking crazy long this time. I will be so happy when I get book 2 in print.)
I finished this page sitting on the show floor at Wizard World New Orleans. That is all.
The title of this page is a reference to Iain [M] Banks’ fabulous book Use of Weapons, which hugely influenced the structure of this final third of the story. I’m tremendously sad I’ll never be able to send him a copy of the final story to let him know what he taught me by example. RIP, Iain; fuck cancer. Fuck it hard.
Well that was a longer break than I intended it to be. It’s been a complicated winter, when it hasn’t been one with absolutely no energy for working on anything. Sorry about the wait, everyone!
Book 3 is quite thoroughly planned out. I’m excited to get back to it, and hope it all hangs together – there’s a fine line between ‘explaining too much’ and ‘not explaining a damn thing’ that realityfuck stories like this have to walk, in my opinion, but I know I’m too damn close to the story to really know if I’m explaining quite enough. (Which reminds me: thanks a ton to everyone who’s commented in the past, saying they’re confused by one part or another of the story, and patiently suffered me editing bits of the previous pages instead of just explaining exactly what you were wondering. I think the story’s better for it.)
I’m sure a lot of you are also wondering about book 2. Vacations and sick leave on the printer’s end slowed things down, plus me getting some hellacious con crud after this year’s Further Confusion. Getting book 2 dealt with is pretty high on my list of priorities right now.
Anyway. This is going to be the last third of the story. There’s things coming up that I’ve been planning since before I even drew the first page, so that should be fun to finally draw. Thanks for sticking around, everyone.
That’s it for book 2. Thanks for reading, everyone.
I’ve been running slow on Rita due to cons and the Kickstarter; I think I’m going to take a break for a few weeks now that book 2 is done. I need to knock out a couple of proposals for shorts I’ve promised before the end of the year, and spend some time getting pretty much the entirety of the final third of the story plotted out. There are some tricky games I’ll be playing that mean I kinda have to have the whole thing at a fairly detailed level before I can start drawing it.
(Plus, to be honest, I’d like to have a couple weeks where I am not thinking about Rita – it’s been in the forefront of my mind for about a whole year, except when it’s been driven out by cons.)
Book 3 will begin somewhere around the new year; keep an eye on the comic’s twitter, facebook, rss feed, or livejournal to know when it comes back, or keep an eye on my blog/twitter/lj/etc to know when it comes back, what else I’m up to, and possibly to know what kind of poop joke I feel like making today.
As I write this, the Kickstarter for book 2 of Rita is 103% funded – enough that the books are definitely gonna get printed. Thanks a ton for all your support, folks! If you wanna see spot gloss on the cover, then spread the word – pimp the comic to your friends, start a page for it on tvtropes, tell your favorite news sites, whatever.
Oops, somehow I managed to forget to queue this one up in all the craziness of the Kickstarter and Further Confusion and whatnot. Hooray for backdating.
Well so much for getting ahead of schedule, huh? The past couple weeks have been full of revamping the website for the upcoming Kickstarter, working on said Kickstarter, preparing for two cons at the end of this month, and taking a trip to visit my mother; updates will probably be sporadic for the next few pages.
I’m also thinking of taking a brief vacation from drawing pages once I get book 2 finished. I need to take some time to get the story organized for book 3 and work on some non-Rita things.
Also, you cannot really see it, but the trees outside of the windows in the green world are totally based on the trees I saw while I was working on this page in New Orleans’s City Park. Morning Call opened up a cafe in the old Casino building in the park and it’s the <em>best thing ever</em> to sit there drawing and eating beignets. Until the mosquitos come out, at least.
Workin’ on the cover for book 2.
Ah, there we go. That’s right. I’ll take it from quick rough to finished art sometime this week. First I probably should work on the next page, as the one this blog entry is attached to is the end of the buffer.
Hey! Fan art!
TWO pieces of fan art!
The first one is from Alethea, and the second one is from Heuwyn Phynn. (Let me know if there’s anywhere you want me to link it to…)
Firstly: The text in this page is not glitched for story reasons. It’s glitched because I’m going to do a couple of “get your name in the story” Kickstarter rewards, and this is one of them. The text has been replaced now!
Secondly, I feel like this is a good place for a public service announcement. We’ve seen Rita-1 use multiple backups over the course of this story. What’s your backup strategy? Does it happen without any work on your part? Have you tested your backups by pulling a few files off of it?
My backup strategy is a one terabyte drive connected to the same USB hub as the tablet on my desk, and Backblaze. The local drive is managed by Apple’s Time Machine, of course. Whenever I’m at my desk, my machine is keeping multiple backups of every new version of my files, and whenever I’m connected to the net, it’s updating the copy on Backblaze’s servers.
The backup strategy that works best for you may be different. If you don’t have one, or you have one that’s such a pain you never do it, have a look at World Backup Day for some suggestions on how to implement both local and off-site backups.
