This page.
This fucking page.
This fucking page took like half a year to draw. Admittedly there were a couple of months in there where I got absolutely no work done on the comic due to my mother dying. But this fucking page.
Now it is… well, okay, not totally done. But done enough that I’m going to post it. And the entire rest of the story, because I finished all of that off while slowly grinding away on this page, too. The blank spots remaining are mostly reserved for friends who said they’d draw a few panels for me and haven’t yet. I’m not gonna name any names; I know all too well how complicated life can get sometimes.
Major thanks to the friends who did fill in some spots for me: Ethan Kohak, who does Black Mudpuppy, Ötty Justason, who does Zukahnaut, and Melissa Fox, who does a lot of cool art.
Tell your friends. Decrypting Rita is finished. Kickstarter for book 3 soon.
Well this one sure took a while. It didn’t help that my Monument Valley trip took longer than intended due to getting snowed in, and nor did me getting a cold and being pretty much useless for the week afterwards.
It also didn’t help that this is a complicated page with a LOT of stuff going on. I’d work on it for a little while and it really wouldn’t feel any more done than it was when I started; that’s kind of disheartening, and makes it hard to keep going.
But now it is done.
The next two pages are going to be at least this complicated, if not more so. But they’re also the two pages that I’ve been planning for since the beginning of the story; when I finish those, it’s all downhill from there.
Woo. This is the start of chapter 25. The next few pages are gonna be pretty damn complicated. I’ve had the image sprawling across this chapter sitting in my notes and my head for the entire duration of this project, and it’s both scary and delightful to finally get to start drawing it.
hi I just came home from the work session at the bar and I didn’t actually eat anything today so one glass of cider got me pretty wasted. Also I finished a page before I got all wasted. Don’t worry it was already half done when I started drinking.
Up next: That One Page In Chapter 14.
This is a monologue I’ve been working towards since, oooh, chapter VII or thereabouts. It will continue for the next couple of pages, culminating in an unglitched version of that page you’ve been seeing hints of for the entire third volume of the story.
The start of a new chapter! In which we will find out what Mattie said to Rita that had to be so deeply encrypted.
Today I walked from my mom’s place to a cafe in the French Quarter. As I did, I wrote down all kinds of things I was noticing as part of the look of New Orleans – both in the Quarter and in other parts of the city. Ultimately I hope to only draw a lot of these things one or two times, and turn them into parts of a massive library of art brushes, graphic styles, and symbols that I can use to make drawing ‘The Drowning City’ go super-fast.
And then I sat in EnVie for about an hour and drew the big central world 2 panel, and edited a copy of the first one into the second one. And now this page is done.
Tomorrow I fly back to Seattle, and this page gets posted. Buffer? What’s that. But I’ll be able to draw on the plane.
The End.
Not really. But this is the end of chapter 23. And we have finally come around to the unglitched version of this moment we saw back in book 2. (And might I also direct your attention to the end of chapter 13? Repeated imagery is fun.)
About 40 pages left. Then it’s The End for real.
Next page status: Done and in the queue!
I think it is time to admit that I am out of clever page titles for a while. I’m spending so much time jumping aroubd back and forth drawing this chapter that I kinda have no inspiration left for those. Not that it really matters now that the site’s really emphasizing the chapter rather than the individual page.
Next page status: 6 panels, 3 finished, 3 partial. Damn it feels good to be back in the groove of putting out pages on a regular schedule again.
Hi. I’m not dead. Neither is this comic.
The past two months have been crazy: I finally did all the shipping from the book 2 kickstarter, did all the shipping from my store that’d been backed up by that kickstarter, went to three conventions and a wedding in four consecutive weekends, and then basically hid in my living room with the lights off playing a video game.
I’ve been working on the entirety of chapter 20 in one huge file, skipping back and forth. You’ll see why as it slowly unrolls; if you’re a Patreon supporter, you can get a preview of it here. Right now I’ve got the next two pages drawn, so I’m going to actually have some stuff in the buffer for once – let’s see if that serves as a spur to keep me drawing while I’m hanging around New Orleans next week visiting my mother!
This is the end of chapter 13.
This page took a hell of a long time. Mostly because I’ve been busy doing stuff for Rainfurrest. I’m still not quite done with the conbook cover for that.
Also of course there’s Kickstarter fulfillment starting to happen. I probably need to get some friends together for a shipping party soon…
Rita’s boss is pixellated out because you’re just not cleared for that.
Or maybe they’re pixellated out because they’re a YCH who’s going to be a Kickstarter reward. Possibly at a stupidly high level because I really kinda like having them be a mystery, although I may want to rework them a little bit to make it obvious they’re definitely not Barrett beneath all the pixelation.
Anyway. There’s still some stuff left in this chapter. Guess I’d better get to drawing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…)
