A moment of silence for Dragon Rita, please.
Archives
Boomerang
barrett3, carol3, gary3, panopticon, rita3, tom3Now you know why Carol (the sorceress) looked so confident in the last page.
Also, huzzah, I’m actually putting a couple pages in the buffer for once along with this one!
What? RITA is evolving!
#fuckyeahdragons
Also I spent like a half hour trolling the web for decorative borders for Realio Trulio Dragon Rita before deciding to just make my own. It’s a pattern brush, so it’s super easy to keep using it for future MAJESTIC DRAGON SPEECH.
Threats and Other Promises
barrett2, carol3, gary3, rita1, rita2, rita3, rita4, tom3Further Confusion + mostly finishing off game art project for now – sufficient sunshine + complicated damn pages = OH GOD THIS ONE TOOK FOREVER AND I’M SO GLAD TO HAVE FINALLY GOTTEN TO DO THIS ONE. It’s pulling one of the tricks I’ve been waiting to do since I started this comic.
A Challenger Appears!
barrett2, carol3, gary3, gary4, rita2, rita4, tom3, tom4Hey, it’s a page! It was nice to have an excuse to draw Blue Rita again, even if she was in Red Rita’s palette.
And since this is the first page of the new year…
Also, I went back through the story so far and tagged each page with what character shows up on it! Maybe later I’ll edit the theme so the tags actually show up near the page. But right now I should get some stuff together for Further Confusion.
(I was hoping to have some printed copies of Rita to sell there, but that’s just not gonna happen. I will however have some copies of the first chapter of Absinthe, and a few Tarot decks!)
Encounter Screen
barrett2, barrett3, carol2, gary3, gary4, rita2, rita3, rita4, tom4This page took too long. Way too long. A week of distraction followed by two weeks of vacation and a funeral, followed by a week of recovery. Today I finally managed to get together enough sustained effort to do several panels in one day. I’ve got partial scripts and pageflow for the next four pages; hopefully they’ll come a bit faster. Sheesh.
Meanwhile… My old friend Gabe’s been doing this cool little strip about growing up in the seventies. It’s kind of the polar opposite of this story about the future, really. He just came out with a collection of it.
You can pick it up here; if you want a copy. Or get a PDF for five bucks if you’re going all digital.
Getting Drunk with Carl Linnæus
barrett3, carol2, gary4, rita2, rita3, rita4, tom4I’m kinda thinking of moving the unofficial schedule to Tuesday/Wednesday. Especially now that I’m doing three rows per page.
Triply Redundant
barrett3, carol2, gary4, rita2, rita3, rita4Things I googled for reference while drawing this page:
• David Bowie’s Area
• Rigging diagrams
Also holy crap drawing three tiers on one page takes forever. Now I know why nobody does this multiple-stories-in-parallel thing for very long. It’s going to get worse, too.
Morning Rites
barrett3, carol2, gary4, rita3, rita4, tom4Yes, this is still a sci-fi comic despite the dragon, the elves, and the lady on a flying boat with a magic sword. Trust me, okay?
DELICIOUS BRAINS.
FRPG
barrett3, kim3, rita3, rita4ROSA from Jesús Orellana on Vimeo.
Here is a short, dialogueless film called “Rosa” about some very, very, very pretty robots. I mean seriously pretty, the kind of space I was going with the Wind-Up Boy in Five Glasses of Absinthe (NSFW).
Sadly it gets kinda wound up in its fight scene; halfway through I kinda quit caring about the green-eyed lady as a character and just wanted to see how pretty she was for a little while longer.
And speaking of green-eyed ladies, yep, now there’s FOUR Ritas in play here. This one may be riffing on the ideas Nick and I had for the first sequel to Five Glasses of Absinthe, though I swear I didn’t pick the color palette with that in mind. For that matter I wasn’t expecting to have a fourth world in here for a while yet! I need to update the cast page to reflect this, and finish documenting the other three worlds in it for that matter.
Cryptomnesia
rita3One of the initial inspirations for Decrypting Rita was the first issue of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. I didn’t actually read it, mind you – I just read an appreciation of it, with a couple of pages scanned here and there. The description of it starting with Fury climbing a tower to fight a mysterious man resonated, and a little later that day I’d opened up Illustrator and drawn the title page of Rita.
The other night, I decided to finally read the damn thing. I found a torrent and set it to downloading. Today, I stuck the first volume of the comic onto the iPad and started reading.
The first issue quickly establishes that Fury is unkillable – first by killing Fury four pages in, then revealing this was actually a robot double on a testing exercise. Then by making Fury run two miles in less than ten minutes and catche a moving rocket sled to escape from a missile when a test of his invulnerable-to-explosions suit goes wrong.
Meanwhile, this down-on-his-luck dude is handed a briefcase full of two hundred thousand dollars and a bomb, phones home to tell his wife and kid, and is blown up.
It’s like Steranko wanted to eat his cake and have it too in the same way I’m doing with Rita: he’s got this wild tale of super-action and a story about normal human emotions. But in the end he gives up on it when Fury’s hyperkinetic action steals the show. Later issues are much more firmly about Fury. Me? I’ve got this crazy formalist experiment I want to try, so I keep having to think about the normal world as well as the crazy superpowered one. I also have a lot more space to work in, so I don’t have to dump huge chunks of plot via dialogue like Steranko does!
Of course, it also helps that I have no deadline on this thing, so I can keep on tying my brain in the knots required to write two stories at once. Steranko’s run on Nick Fury is all of about half a dozen issues before he moves on to other things.
A Thousand Pardons!
carol2, panopticon, rita1, rita2, tom1I decided to make the Panopticon a little less subtle in this page. Please let me know if you can see it – monitors vary a lot!
And hooray for actually getting two pages out this week.
If you’re wondering where “gongoozling” for “operating a warp drive” comes from, well, my exes had this running joke about the “Postfurry Solar System” – a lightly-sketched sci-fi setting full of media-terrorist Martian tigers, politely communist blue Mooncats, glamazon bunnies on Venus, mind-controlling squid on Saturn, etc, etc. When I started going out with them, I of course needed a comic-opera space animal caricature or two as well, and thus were born the bipolar raccoons of Mercury and the cheerfully sideways robot spiders of the asteroid belt. They are generally considered kind of insane; they like to blow themselves up for fun now and then, and are pretty much the only users of the warp drive known as the “gongoozler”. Which… does things… …to your brain if you use it, and has a tendency to occasionally make you vanish entirely instead of going where you want to. Especially if you’re in a gravity well.
…Does “warping too deep in a gravity well is hazardous to your health” have a page on TVTropes by now? Why yes, yes it does. (Warning: TVTropes.)
Protocol Mismatch
carol1, carol2, panopticon, rita1, rita2, tom1Ye gods this page took forever to work out. It didn’t help that a lot of my “work on Rita” time this week was spent on putting together some packages of it to ship off to a few publishers – having the Tarot deck get international distribution really spoilt me on all the hassles of self-publishing, and I want to do more stuff that way!
Meanwhile in the “when can I be like Rita1” news, check out this video of Boston Dynamics’ new bipedal robot.
Artistbots! Transform And Deconstruct!
carol2, rita1, rita2Hands up: who’s had an ex like Tom1?
Rita2 enters a dance studio just as I prepare to do the same. Hopefully things will be less hectic for me this time.
A Gift Comes!
carol1, rita1, tom1This page’s title refers to Tales Of The Beanworld, which is totally worth buying. I don’t cite Marder as an influence on how I make comics or anything, I just think Beanworld is totally awesome. I’ve got all three of the recent hardbound reissues/new material, and am eagerly awaiting the fourth.
Stack Trace
carol1, rita1, tom1, trish1, Vespuline Mining ConcernAny guesses as to which agency is going to cover a new window at McMillian’s? So many possibilities.
I had to do most of the bottom left panel twice due to Illustrator crashing on me. Sadface. Variable-width strokes are now on the list of Stuff To Save Before Blending.
ls -al ~rita
carol1, rita1, tom1“Sandbenders” is a William Gibson reference – in Idoru, they’re a company that takes commodity components and puts them in a really beautiful package, with a pretty OS. Hand-carved cases, semi-precious stones for the buttons.
I’m debating if I want to explain this anywhere in the story or not. Probably just having Carol refer to her Sandbenders on-camera again will be enough to say “this is the company that makes her computer”.
Acceleration
rita1, tom1My old server glitched on me one too many times so I moved urnash.com over to the same place that hosts Absinthe. If you’re reading this then the DNS change has propagated!
Let me know if it’s working for you.
We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg
carol1, panopticon, rita1, tom1The title of this page comes from a cryptically-named room in “Jet Set Willy”, which in itself took the title from a line of dialogue in ‘The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’.
(I do not recommend actually trying to play Jet Set Willy unless you have armed yourself with an array of cheat codes – like most 8-bit action-adventure games, it’s punishingly difficult. That’s just what floated up from the back of my brain when I looked at the ‘title’ field of Comicpress’ upload screen.)
People who have suffered through my spotty update schedule in the past month or so will be glad to know that I currently have rough layouts and dialogue for the next SIX pages, with notes in my sketchbook for three more. This should hopefully make it easier for me to get back on some kind of schedule, even though my life’s been delightfully busy of late!
Oh! And also I feel I should mention that if you’re reading this comic via RSS feeds, you should come look at it in the actual website now and then – there are certain things that you really can’t see if this is getting shown on a bright background.
SIG_TERM caught, ignoring…
carol1, rita1Sorry about the wait on this one, folks. This was sitting around like 80% done for most of last week while I ran around like crazy getting ready to do Foolscap – which went very well – and my first paying performance of my “Still Alive” striptease. Which also went amazingly well, the full house loved it and all the rest of the nerdy acts in the show!
Edit: Aaaand I decided to make a lot of the breaking glass solid white instead of white outlines, it reads a lot better that way. Shift-reload if you still see it as outlines. I decided to do this while reading the second collected volume of Jeff Smith’s RASL
SIG_TERM
barrett2, carol1, rita1, rita2, tom1I had to draw the top tier twice because Illustrator crashed while I was undoing a Matrix-looking bullet-time shockwave trail on the bullet. Oh well. Note to self: save before playing with blends that involve distortion meshes. And after completing every panel for that matter.
Also hooray, two pages in one week again!
Protocol Negotiation
barrett2, carol1, rita1, rita2
Kinesthetic Encoding
barrett2, carol1, conrad schnitzler1, rita1, rita2, sarah2I wonder if I should try making Barrett’s t-shirt and offering it for sale. If Barrett was a furry his fursona would totally be an octopus.
Also thanks to everyone who helped brainstorm the slang for “knowing you are about to lose everything since your last backup due to impending death”.
Lossy Decompression
barrett2, carol1, rita1, rita2Looks like I’m getting back on track – I’ve got rough script for at least the next two pages of Rita1’s side, maybe three or four depending on how I pace the visuals, and an idea of where Rita2 and Barrett2’s conversation goes. Will Rita2’s wisecrack defuse Barrett’s mood, or make it worse?
Working in two stories at once like this is an interesting challenge. I find that usually one narrative or the other leads the page, and the other is written around it – sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint. This time Carol’s question was the first thing written, with the staccato overlaps of Barrett2 and Rita2’s argument coming in second; in other pages, it’s been the lower half that needs to be written or drawn first. I think Rita1 comes first a little more often than Rita2 but I’m not entirely sure, I haven’t been keeping any statistics on this!
Relationship Maintenance
barrett2, carol1, rita1, rita2On top of everything else going on in my life, I had a kidney stone this week. In honor of this, I declare that every glass shown on this page is full of water. You should probably drink more of it too if you don’t want one. And believe me when I say you don’t want one; the only safeword that pain respects is “morphine”.
(Book text excerpted from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; I believe two pages of a novel constitutes fair use.)
Suspicious Omissions
barrett2, carol1, rita1, rita2, tom2
Circumlocutions and Lacunæ
barrett2, carol1, gary2, kim2, rita1, rita2, tom2At this point I have pretty much introduced all the elements I want this comic to be About. I’m sure a few more will pop up as I play around with these and try to get to the places I want to take the story and the visuals; I’ve already had things twist and turn in ways I didn’t quite expect.
“Blue Train, LLC” came from a Cibo Matto song that iTunes served up while I was trying to come up with the right name for the Mysterious Organization that Rita(1) works with. It just tasted right.
Frequency Modulation
kim2, rita2, tom2After I scribbled out some linear roughs for the first three panels, I really liked the way they looked. Sadly, Illustrator pretty much sucks at trying to simulate using a real brush, no matter which of its several attempts at solving the problem you use. So after a few fruitless minutes reminding myself this was still the case, I printed this page out, grabbed the Zebra brush-pen I had lying around, and knocked out some inks.
It’s not an entirely successful experiment, but it gives this page the right unearthly feel.
Sure. Hand me another taquito, PK.
barrett2, carol1, kim2, rita1, rita2, tom2Sorry this one is so late! I got caught up in stuff for my burlesque class, and in doing this crazy little animation starring Rita(1)!
