Decrypting Rita

Bleah. I just spent the last couple hours cleaning up some malware. Thanks to Gilrain for the heads-up on it. Browsers will probably bitch about me serving malware for a few days longer until their los

I was going to spend a few hours tonight working on the next page but then this came up. Feh. Not that I’ve been making that “twice weekly” promise anyway, despite my best intentions – blame low energy plus increasingly complicated backgrounds after a Moebius binge – but it would’ve been nice to have this page done tonight, or close to done tonight. Sigh.

The general reaction to the weird-ass photographic cover I experimented with last week was “put down the crack pipe, Peggy”. Albiet much more politely. Im glad I decided to ASK people if “making it look like a novel” was a totally awesome idea or a stupid one; I was really unsure because I’m too close to it sometimes.

So I fooled around with the photo cover and the flier I’d made a little while ago and got this. Once I added the Panopticon, I knew I was done. I might fool around with new drawings specifically for the cover; I dunno.

Here’s a comic I found that seems to be intending to go some of the places I explicitly decided to avoid going with Rita – it sounds like it’s going to play with the point in time where robots and uploads become seen as fully “human”.

Also it is rendered pretty much entirely in shades of blue and the ‘about’ page mentions some of the characters are queer, so, well, maybe I’m just biased what with doing a very blue comic about a kinda queer robot lady? Anyway, check out O Human Star. I can’t say too much about it since it’s just one chapter long so far, but I’ll be watching it to see where it goes.

Meanwhile, the Kickstarter went off pretty well. It ended up at about 250% of my original goal, only a few hundred bucks short of the threshold I set for getting spot gloss on the Panopticon. I’m going to run the numbers in the next couple days and decide if I’m going to throw in some of my own funds to make that happen, now that it’s so close. Thanks a ton to everyone who contributed!

I’m working on the next page of Rita; I suspect there’s only gonna be one page this week, due to me scrambling to finish off the art for Further Confusion 2013′s website (it should go live on the first; right now it’s their default skin), and for my contribution to “Feast Yer Eyes”, a free tabloid-sized anthology a friend in New Orleans does, whose deadline is the first. The next page of Rita’s about, ooh, 1/3 done. I really wish I could manage to work up a buffer but I think I’d require a time bubble to do so. Or at least better work habits. Le sigh.

Also, my art is going to be in Heavy Metal. Really. They’re doing a special SDCC issue this year, and this piece from 2005 will be one of three variant back covers. OMG I’M GONNA BE IN HEAVY METAL. KEVIN EASTMAN LEFT A GUSHING COMMENT ON MY DRAWING. SQUEEEE. *happy dance*

Alright, so running around getting ready for pitching Decrypting Rita to some publishers at ECCC this coming weekend ate up all the time I had.

But… on a whim, I replied to some of the comments on this LJ post of a spambot conversation with drawings of Rita answering them from her point of view. And it was fun!

So I’ve set up tumblr for that purpose. Go give her some better questions than the ones the Tumblr robot occasionally asks!

Hmm. Not sure if I’m gonna have a page today; I got distracted yesterday drawing an obscene Adventure Time fan-comic. And today my brain seems to want to work on writing out story – I’ve got two successive infodumps of backstory coming up now, with Elf-Barrett narrating his version of what just happened in parallel.

I thought I’d share a bit of the process here with a quick grab of the current page, sprawling way way out into the next 2-3 pages. Sometimes I do this with little thumbnails of the page and particular panels, as seen in the bottom photo of a sketchbook; other times it’s the dialogue that leads, like on the right. I’ve actually got like three pages of dense writing in my sketchbook that that the blue conversation is being distilled down from, including timelines of two variant versions of the story R1 ends up telling!

I’m fairly confident I’ll find a way to make this interesting and exciting to look at. Probably Dragon Rita’s story will drift out of focus while some wild physical thing happens to Skylands Rita… or maybe Normal Rita will perform the dance number she’s been mentioning wanting to do! Maybe both.