Woo. The first page back after that website-rebuilding hiatus is a heck of a downer, isn’t it? Sorry about that!
Archives
Targeting
barrett4, gary4, kim4, Megæra, rita1, rita4
An Unexpected Calm
barrett4, Megæra, rita1, rita4
Dragonriders
barrett4, kim3, Megæra, rita1, rita3, rita4
Turbocharge
gary4, kim3, Marid vonSalfoz, Megæra, rita1, rita3, rita4
Claws and Walls
barrett4, kim3, Megæra, rita1, rita3, rita4The background in panel 2 of the lower tier took a lot longer than I expected it to. Totally worth it, though.
Also taking longer than expected: hosing things out after a malware intrusion. Le sigh. Man, first thing I’m gonna do when the ad revenues actually exceed the outlays here is pay for someone to build me a backend for my sites based on a framework that is much more anal about intrusion than WordPress.
Dangerous Invitations
andrei1, barrett4, Mattie1, reb1, rita4, Vespuline Mining ConcernOh geeze this page took entirely too long. I had it all written at the beginning of LAST week. And then I drew the first panel. Did a nice drawing of the Mattie, Reb, and Andrei clustered around the visualization of the spread of the Sunrisers’ work.
And I knew it was wrong. But I’d spent enough time on it that I was reluctant to do the right thing and abandon it. I took most of a week to decide to do that.
Of course, I also spent this week running around frantically trying to get a passport together, and when it became clear that was going to fail a mere few days too late for the impromptu European trip a friend had proposed, also going and being a stage kitten at a burlesque show. (A “stage kitten”, also known as a “pickup artist”, is the person who puts out props before an act… and comes out to pick up what’s been strewn about the stage afterwards. If she does her job right this involves showing a lot of ass now and then.) After that I spent a whole day doing nothing but lying around a quiet apartment reading.
And I ditched that panel, scaled the Earth up, and made it hopefully a bit clearer what’s going on. Because this is an Important Bit Of The Story.
Then I went to the comic shop and picked up a few things – the latest issue of Prophet (bizarre as always), the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (underwhelming), the latest issue of Atomic Robo (fun), and… a hardbound reprint of the entirety of Moebius and Jodorowsky’s Incal.
Which might explain how wide the other three panels in this page are; I’d been thinking for a few weeks that I need to start pulling my camera back and showing more of the world, and a big dose of Moebius’ drawings really made me excited about doing that. We’ll see how this affects future pages; I’ve been feeling like the stark style I draw this in makes it hard to really pull back sometimes.
Oh, and here’s that abandoned version of that first panel.
Delicious Cake
andrei1, cake, Mattie1, reb1, Vespuline Mining ConcernThis is the cake recipe Reb is pulling up.
Nobody in the Belt really knows why any more, but this is the traditional cake to bake when you wish to dispel suspicion that you are a malevolent AI. Yes, this is a thing that happens often enough that people have a traditional “I’m Not An Evil AI, No, Really” gift.
Choose Your Destination
andrei1, gary4, Mattie1, Megæra, panopticon, reb1, rita1, rita4, tom1, Vespuline Mining ConcernHere’s the list of destinations Tom is picking from so you don’t have to hold your screen up to a mirror.
destination subjective time
Straylight 3s
Vesta 14s
Czarina-Kluster 23s
Funk Soul 372s
Shaeffer’s Choice 2942s
Höel 70042s
Strangedown 78309s
Eros Kluster 82409s
Pasiphaë 146239s
Sinope 146935s
Amalthea 147001s
Ganymede 147007s
New Val Halen 147002s
Callisto 147003s
Shaeffer’s Choice 147014s
The Moose Denied 147020s
Europa Nature Preserve 147004s
Himara 147271s
Io 147692s
Elara 147848s
Leda 148234s
New Amsterdam 183327s
Apparently Shaeffer chose both ways.
This is a mix of names I made up, orbital/asteroid habs from books that influenced me, and several of Jupiter’s moons – I guess Pallas is hanging out near the Jovian system at the time of this story. Which I suppose could give an enterprising nerd a guess as to the exact date this is happening, if I’d actually done any of those calculations myself. Which I did not.
And I don’t know about you, but I really do not want to visit a place called “Höel”. I think it was colonized by a bunch of Ren & Stimpy revivalists. shudder
Splits and Grafts
andrei1, gary4, Mattie1, Megæra, reb1, rita1, rita4, tom1, Vespuline Mining ConcernMegaera’s French accent in her roar has turned into her screaming machine-translated French. This makes me giggle when I draw it. A lot.
This page took forever, what with designing and naming two more members of the Vespuline Hive, drawing Megaera twice, AND all those mirror-copies of Rita and Gary.
Thrilling Chase Sequence
gary4, Megæra, rita1, rita4, tom1, Vespuline Mining ConcernIf you look carefully, you’ll notice that the Vespulines have been coming since the very first page of this chapter.
This is in part because I went back and added them in the background of the previous page – but they’re the tiny little dots changing in the very first panels of this chapter. So many things to keep track of!
Beautiful Monsters
gary4, Megæra, rita1, rita1a, rita4, tom1, Vespuline Mining ConcernFurther Confusion website: Done, barring one little tweak.
Feast Yer Eyes submission: Done.
Less projects hanging around means less time sitting around going OH GOD WHAT AM I GOING TO WORK ON NOW EVERYTHING IS HIGH PRIORITY. Plus the deadline-pushing of those two finished projects seems to have reminded me that yes, I can focus on drawing stuff for several hours in a row, which is only going to help the schedule for Rita!
Coincidence corner: This the 64th page of this graphic novel. As I was working on the last couple of panels, iTunes started playing the soundtrack to the Beatles movie “Yellow Submarine”. Which includes “When I’m 64”. I swear the mention of “lovely, Rita” in the flashback dialogue was wholly unintentional!
Also it greatly amuses me that Megaera’s roar has a bit of a French accent. The green world is sort of a tribute to French fantasy comics, after all. (And to Doctor Who but that’s another matter entirely.)
Future page status: blue world has rough scripts and even some thumbnails and incidental character designs for the next three pages, green world has rough scripts for one page and outlines for the next 3-4. Will there be another page this week? I hope so!
Meanwhile, back in the Skylands…
gary4, rita1, rita4, tom1, Vespuline Mining ConcernI decided to document a bit of my process for this one. I also did most of it out on the hill in Gasworks Park – I love having a laptop!
Click on the thumbnails for full-size, of course.
The first thing I do is make a new file from my template. The dark blue lines are panel border guides, the light blue ones are the text-safe area. I have a gutter down the middle of the text-safe area because when I go to print, each page becomes a spread, so I don’t want to put text across that by accident. The template also has my color palette in its swatches, and a bunch of word balloons on the dialogue layer outside of the page, so I can just say “I need a normal dialogue balloon”, “I need an encrypted dialogue balloon”, “I need some HUD text” or whatever and drag a copy into the image area.
If I’m not doing an action sequence, I start with the dialogue. I usually have a rough idea of what it should be, but I don’t bother finalizing it until I’m working on the page. Sometimes the panel layout is first; I even have thumbnails hanging around that are nothing but panel flow from one page to the next.
After I’ve got the dialogue down, I rough in the action. This page is a bit unusual in that I used a photograph of something I’d previously scrawled in my sketchbook in pen; 99% of the time, I rough stuff out in Illustrator. Sometimes I do it in lines, sometimes I do it in rough sloppy shapes.
Most of the time I work from front to back. The figure is almost always the most important part of the panel; I compose the lights and darks of the background around it. Also, hooray for pattern fills on Rita’s skirt – that’s the same pattern I was using on her gloves, for the first appearances of Skylands Rita.
The figures are pretty much done here. And the bottom panels are definitely done; I was able to knock the out really, really quickly by cutting and pasting stuff from the middle of chapter 5. I generally prefer to draw stuff fresh instead of cut and paste, but if I can copy over a complicated machine I will totally do it. (Also note that Gary’s last line has been edited a little. I felt the new phrasing gave him a little more of an English feel; the green storyline is kind of me doing a riff on the countless hours of Doctor Who I watched in my teens and twenties.)
And finally I add in some background details. The big note in the sky is because I was closing the laptop to go back home, and didn’t want to glance at this page and think it was done.
Two Enter, One Leaves
barrett1, kim4Okay, we’re in the final week of the Rita Kickstarter. I’ve gotten some better quotes, that are letting me revise the threshold for spot gloss down by a LOT – I think I can make it happen at around $6400. If you haven’t ordered a copy, this is getting down to your last chance to get it for this price – it’ll be $25 plus shipping afterwards, or $25 plus all the expense of attending a convention.
I’m debating whether or not this is the end of chapter VI. It’d make for the shortest chapter so far at only six pages, but I feel like I might need the chapter break to actually shift the scene like a normal comic for once. The last time I used this particular panel layout was back at the end of chapter 1; it really feels like part of this particular leitmotif might be that it ends a chapter.
(Leitmotif? Yeah, seriously. I’ve been thinking about this comic in somewhat musical terms since I began, and this past weekend I started to realize that the deliberate repetition of panel arrangements was arguably creating an equivalent to the use of small phrases to represent characters, places, or emotion in huge works like operas. You can see some of my initial Twitter ponderings of the idea here, and ponder the definition of it on Wikipedia. Of course the real test will be if I pull up other panel arrangements to bring up certain moods.)
ALSO I am finally starting to rebuild my habits of productivity after the trough caused by three cons in two weekends, a week of recovery, and another week of being down with some vicious concrud. So hopefully things should be a little more regular around here soon.
Thanks to Gabe for his pimpage of Rita and the Kickstarter on Dumm Comics, and to E.K. Weaver for the link from her TJ And Amal!
She Spreads Her Penumbra Like The Wings of an Enormous Bird
barrett1, kim1Only two more weeks to get a copy of the book! You get shipping for free; if you get one afterwards, it’ll be $25 plus shipping. Or plus attending a con.
Man I’m gonna be glad when I finish this scene and can quit drawing all these friggin’ exercise machines.
Justifying the Means
barrett1, kim1, panopticonBarrett knows what’s best. Barrett always knows what’s best.
I really wish I’d been able to show this through Rita’s eyes but letting you in on what the Sunrisers are trying to do was more important.
If you follow my twitter and/or LJ you’re probably tired of hearing about this, but the Kickstarter is still going. I’ve set a secondary goal of $20,000; this will get spot gloss on the Panopticon, which should be AWESOME. The book’s happening either way; now it’s just a matter of how sweet the printing is.
I’ve got my studio mostly cleaned up from the past month of craziness; I was able to sit at the coffee table to finish this page. Hopefully that means the return of a semi-regular schedule. I hope I’m not inviting disaster by changing the schedule from “updates whenever” to “updates twice a week”.
Finally, here is one of the heads of Image responding to people saying that the way Marvel and DC have treated creators over the years is okay. It’s really nice to see someone that high up in the industry saying that no, it’s not okay for this to be business as usual, even if the contracts were all legal and above-board.
Amaterasu and Apollo
Two weeks prepping for and going to cons. One week recovering from those cons, in which I knocked out the very simple first two pages of this chapter. Then one week succumbing to concrud that may have been whooping cough. And another week putting off drawing this page because oh god exercise machine. This page took too damn long, and I really miss being in the groove of two pages a week with other stuff done around them!
I need to go back into the previous page and change the hint of the exercise machine to match what I ended up drawing here but right now I am just delighted to have another page up.
Also of course the Kickstarter is still going! It’s fully funded; now I’m looking into spot gloss on the Panopticon as a secondary goal.
Imperfect Forwards Secrecy
barrett1, kim1I actually have a buffer of a couple pages! We’ll see how long that lasts.
Titles (Book 2)
barrett1Welcome back.
This is the beginning of book 2, and of chapter VI. We’ll get to book 2’s titles in a moment. (Incidentally, book 1 was called “An Exchange Of Secrets With Oblivious Transfer”.)
Uneasy Slumber
panopticonAaaand that’s it for book 1. I’m going to take another week off, maybe two – I need a vacation! I might draw a few more answers to your wonderful questions for Rita, so keep an eye on that, or on my tweetles.
On April 12, 2011, I drew what became page 2 of this comic. Over the next few weeks I had some ideas about formalist experiments pop up, and started drawing a few more pages. Two months later I set this site up and decided I was going to attempt two pages a week. Which proved a more elusive goal than I’d hoped, what with moving away from my exes, my first burlesque performance, a medical crisis, and the umpteen other distractions that made up the past year.
This is page 56, so in slightly less than a year I’ve averaged a bit better than a page every week. Hopefully the next year will see me manage a better schedule. No promises though; life continues to be interesting, and there’s really nobody I can call in to help with the production of this book.
I’m going to try and get together a printed volume soon. Maybe Lulu, maybe with a real printer after a Kickstarter – I need to run the numbers on that and decide if I have any hope of that coming off successfully. More on that as things develop. If anyone knows of a printer in the PacNW, let me know – I’d love to cut out some of the shipping fees!
Finally, a big thanks to everyone who’s been reading along, especially those of you who’ve tried to figure out just what’s going on with the multiple Ritas and the Panopticon! Doing comics is lonely work. especially when you’re not quite sure if WordPress is refusing to allow some folks to comment.
The Collective
andrei1, barrett3, kim3, Liz1, Mattie1, rita1, rita3, rob1, tom1, Vespuline Mining ConcernThere is a layer in this page called “I thought I was done drawing bookshelves when I finished chapter 1 of Absinthe”. It contains abstracted books, cut and paste from that comic.
“Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” – Wally Wood
Also, Mattie’s shape is inspired by some of the work of master photomanipulator J. K. Potter, most specifically his portrait of Lydia Lunch.
A Pause Between Stories
barrett3, kim3, rita1, rita3, tom1, tom10, tom12, tom2This one took a while! Lots of finicky stuff. It would have taken less time if I hadn’t come up with silly titles for the books in the second panels of the lower tiers, but sometimes you just have to do these things.
I dunno if we’ll ever see Tom10 (Heckboy) or Tom12 (Steampunk Vampire) again. I had to draw the entirety of each Tom, so here’s that panel without the world-layer effects…
And also here is a shot of the library close enough to read it. If you can figure out what all of the titles are mutations of, then… you’re probably me.
ALSO here is a model sheet I finally threw together of Dragon Rita. I really need to make these for more of the characters, to be honest. I’m lazy.
Story time!
barrett3, kirteen1, kirteen10, rita1, rita3, tom1, tom10As it turns out I think this one would have been a little late even if I HADN’T spent Wednesday doing dirty Adventure Time fan comics and going to see “John Carter Of Mars”. Having two characters start to tell stories in parallel, with a whole bunch of new designs on the page, made it pretty slow going.
And if you’re wondering, I would have cut and paste that drawing of Elf Barrett even if I wasn’t drawing seven other panels completely from scratch. Sometimes you just gotta do a hold!
Also I hope that it’s pretty obvious from the context that a “sundrop” race is one whose route takes it REALLY STUPIDLY CLOSE TO THE SUN.
Boyfriends Are Useless
barrett3, rita1, rita3, tom1, Vespuline Mining ConcernI was really tempted to slack off and finish this Tuesday but, well, I got started on this one late because I spent a couple hours on the phone with one of my idols. And one thing I am continually amazed by when we talk about getting stuff done is HOW FAST HE IS.
So, you know, I let myself take some breaks and browse the web a bit, but I kept on thinking, man, Matt Howarth wouldn’t be doing this, he’d just be sittin’ there at his desk, chain-smoking and drawing up a storm. So I ended up making myself stay up late enough to finish this page.
There is a growing part of me that wants to go back and make the expressions of the earlier pages a bit wilder; I really feel like I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with all these characters as time goes on. But I’d rather press forwards and keep telling the story. Speaking of which, there should be EXPLANATIONS forthcoming for both of the on-stage Ritas next page!
Also I got my first rejection letter from a publisher for this project. IT’S A REAL THING NOW.
Apologetic Elf Is Apologetic
carol3, gary3, panopticon, rita1, The Very Sorry Song, tom1, tom3This is another page whose expressions made me laugh while drawing it. I really feel like doing this comic has taught me a lot about drawing human emotions! I owe a lot of that to Phil Foglio, and, to be honest, like him, I probably care a little less than I should about keeping faces on-model.
Originally the top tier had three completely different panels, but those will be appearing on the next page. I’ll lose some counterpoint that made me grin, but I really, really felt like I needed the brief pause after Blue Rita’s heartfelt scream.
Amazingly Polite Inquiries
panopticon, rita2, rita3Six minutes ago, Rita1 was in a cafe making a date. Then her stupid thrillseeking ex came back into her life. Then she saw a dragon who acted and sounded just like her get her brains blown out by some wizard. And now this.
Somewhere deep below the neural network that calls itself “Rita”, a tiny subtask is calculating the probability that Tom will have any kind of coherent explanation for this. Even a bad one. It is rapidly converging on zero.
Also I really did not know that Rita1 could scream that loud. Damn.
—-
And finally – this is the fiftieth page! Thanks to everyone who’s been reading this far; I’d love to hear what you folks out there think. If the comment section isn’t working for you (hopefully it is, I think I cleared up some problems it was having), my email is egypt@urnash.com, and I’m egypturnash on AIM. Or you could just write a review or critique and post it in your blog; Google will tell me about it pretty quickly!
all your weapons are belong to us
Wednesday, I got out of bed and started working on this page. I took a break after roughing out the first panel to shower, and to think about how to handle the action sequence I’m beginning – unsurprisingly I think I’m going to end up expanding one page into a couple.
And then after I solved those problems, I started thinking about the overall story. About the stuff I’ve been planning out for the climax. And I had some ideas pop into my head of what Rita will look like at that point in the story. When I got out, I pulled up a new file in the page template, and drew madly for ten or twenty minutes. Then I saved it as page 100. It’ll probably be more like 150 at this rate, but hey, as long as it’s fun, right?
I’m tempted to have very brief hints of this Rita start showing up. We’ll see. For now, just know that the end of the story is getting firmer in my mind; this drawing spurred some thinking about what exactly happens at the climax, and ways I can start foreshadowing it! (Plus I can say that the final Rita was created on leap day, which seems KIND OF APPROPRIATE all things considered.)
ALSO! Here is some totally sweet fan art of Rita from the fabulous Thomas Blue. You should buy some of his comics because they are great. (Sadly he seems to have pulled ‘The City Dreams of Tamino The Cat’ from the net while he hunts for a publisher.)
Fantasy Targeting
barrett3, carol3, gary3, rita1, tom3I decided to have one more page of setup to make sure you know what’s going on – the “Rita1 glitches into World3” page ended up being almost entirely about the glitch and not about establishing the situation.
Also OH MAN I HAD SO MUCH FUN WITH RITA’S FACE IN THIS PAGE. Seriously. I REALLY LOVE the fact that I’m approaching this like an ANIMATOR instead of caring about accurate depictions of reality, I get to draw CRAZY EXPRESSIONS. Man I never draw expressions like that when I’m doing a pin-up because “worry/repulsion” is just NOT an emotion that comes up in that context.
Posted this one a tiny bit early because guess who did absolutely nothing to stay on top of her buffer this past week? I worked on a single-page comic for a broadsheet compilation, threw together the first try at a printed volume, and did social things instead. And still managed to draw this page from scratch (not counting my chaotic notes) in one day.
GLITCH
barrett3, carol3, gary3, rita1, tom3Sound effect: a brief burst of the horrible noises you get when improperly inserting a cartridge into a game system.
9L17¢#
panopticon, rita1_________ .__ __ .________
\_ ___ \| |__ _____ _______/ |_ ___________ | ____/
/ \ \/| | \\__ \ \____ \ __\/ __ \_ __ \ |____ \
\ \___| Y \/ __ \| |_> > | \ ___/| | \/ / \
\______ /___| (____ / __/|__| \___ >__| /______ /
\/ \/ \/|__| \/ \/
CRACKED AND +4 TRAINED BY THE SUNRISE SYNDICATE!
We are, I think, a third of the way through the story. Maybe half, I’m not entirely sure. Now is probably a good time to go back and read all of chapter 4 or even the whole thing!