Anthrocon was fun, but took a lot out of me. I spent the first two days after the con unable to do more than lie naked on a giant purple beanbag chair and vaguely poke at the net. Hence the gap in pages.
On the way home I read the latest from Charlie Stross, “Neptune’s Brood“. It’s about a research banker who gets caught up in a galaxy-spanning financial scam, and forcibly rebuilt into a mermaid. It’s set in the same universe as “Saturn’s Children“, but much much much much later. I enjoyed it a lot. And only after reading the book did I realize that pretty much every important character is a lady. Hooray! More like this please, people.
This song totally sums up Rita1 and Carol1’s gestating relationship.
Also HOORAY, this is page ONE HUNDRED.
This page is a whole week later than it should be. Mostly because every time I’d look at it, it was scary and intimidating. And when I’d get a panel finished, there was still a huge amount of work left. Having ten panels on one page will do that to you.
I’ll be at Anthrocon this coming week, which will probably counteract the effects of going down to two Ritas per page for a couple of weeks – a cross-country flight plus the Biggest Furry Con There Is is probably going to leave me useless for anything more than playing video games for a half a week.
At any rate, if you’re going to be at Anthrocon, be sure to drop by my table!
Looks like I only managed one page this week. Not surprising, there were errands to run in the sun, the beginnings of a complete revamp of what I eat, and a much-needed visit from the ex-with-benefits after a couple weeks of that not coming together. At least I knocked off a couple of not-Rita art things that had been lingering for ages.
Also, if you are deep into the Tumblr thing and feel like being my unpaid promotion team, maybe you feel like reblogging some of the recent things I posted on the Ask Rita tumblr – I threw some big chunks of comic in there to see if I can get any new readers from what everyone says is the most hoppingest social media site nowadays.
This one’s a day later than it should have been; I spent a lot of the time I would have liked to have been working on it this past Wednesday and Thursday on (a) stressing out over some Twitter drama and (b) recovering from my first try at running with minimalist shoes – that gave certain muscles and tendons that normally never get used a HUGE workout.
I also added some stuff to the previous page, so go have a look at that if you’re reading the pages as they come out – I decided I liked the rhythms better if both world 2 and 3 were overlapping the page boundary.
Also I would like to direct you to the Kickstarter my friend Ursula Husted is running for her new book, “The Lions of Valetta“. It’s about stray cats, art history, and the meaning of life, and it gets a big thumbs-up from me.
The spell circle dragon-Rita’s sitting in owes a ton to imagery from The Dark Crystal. I had the art book from the movie when I was young, and I think it shaped something subtle and important that runs beneath the surface in my art. There was gonna be some purple in it at one point but then I was all “wait no Barrett doesn’t have that access in the it’s-all-a-hackjob interpretation”. It is hard to write four narratives at once and try to make things work with at least three different interpretations of What’s Really Going On, but if you’re gonna write reality trouble stories, you kinda have to. Geez, writing stories with only one layer of reality is gonna feel so easy when I’m done with this.
While I was finishing this page, I spent some time reading a manga called “Ultra Heaven“, which touches on a lot of the same themes as Rita for its first two volumes. The third goes off in a very different direction from where I’m going, and I think ultimately kind of punctures everything the first two volumes set up – but it’s pretty interesting while it’s going. If you’re looking for another reality trouble comic to read while I slowly finish this one, this isn’t a bad choice at all. Although it is really quite lacking in cute robot babes. Thanks to the ever-awesome Brandon Graham for the link.
Okay now to set up the next page and then go get baked and play board games with some friends.
Cameo appearance by Megan Rose Gedris, aka “Florence of A Labia”. I do not know how that woman finds the time to draw so many awesome comics and squeeze in the occasional burlesque performance. I really must get my own spangled ass back up on the stage sometime soon.
Tree ref courtesy of finishing this page while looking out the window on the train from Seattle to Portland.
The title of this page and the previous one is a reference to Rush’s song “Red Barchetta “. What’s your favorite song about COOL CARS WHAT GO FAST VROOM VROOM?
Also holy cow this is page #92. This is getting close to being the biggest thing I’ve ever done.
Monday, instead of finishing this page before Tuesday’s page went up, I went out running in the evening. I’m mmmaybe attempting the Couch-to-5k thing with the help of the Zombies, Run! app. Then when I got home I basically collapsed in front of Skyrim until midnight. My lizard-girl assassin is now receiving visions from the dessicated corpse that runs the Assassin’s Guild.
So I spent Tuesday working on this, and now I get to spend all Wednesday working to try and have something in the buffer again once this page goes live. A minor setback in Project Build A @#$% Buffer, but I’m not letting it get me down.
PS. You should basically be playing your favorite THIS FAST CAR IS WAY COOL song while reading this entire chapter.
ALSO! Elon Musk is talking to Google about putting their autodrive technology in Tesla’s cars! Bits of this story are set a looong while from now, but other bits are really only about a decade off. HELLO FUTURE.
Oh god this page took like six hours to draw and I did pretty much everything but the very vague rough and the close-up of Carol in one day. I’m kinda glad to get things moving but man that was a lot more solid work than I’ve been used to lately.
Still: by uploading this just before midnight on Wednesday, I get to continue to have one page in the buffer after the preceding page drops one minute after midnight on Thursday. PROJECT BUFFER CONTINUES.
…and then I fooled around with it on Thursday and Friday to tweak the dialogue a little and add the red triangles. Which are done by making huge pattern fills the size of the page with scribbles of a pressure-sensitive pattern brush, and applying them to the shapes – it’s a very sideways and Illustratory way to say “hey I want to paint in these twenty shapes”. Big thanks to Nick for helping me decide that yes, I do want to make an ambiguous statement in the language of color this story has going – I think we talked about it for like an hour.
Also, here is the reference self-shot I used for that panel of Carol plugging herself into the car.
Two things.
One: I’m playing with the name for the car. Originally I had it as “Mazzigatti”, but Nick was of the opinion that sounded too much like a parody of “Maserati”, which was not my intent – I just wanted an Italian name, because Italians + cars = impractical, gorgeous, fast things.
I went digging around for Italian cryptographers, and found Silvio Micali, one of the co-inventors of the zero-knowledge proof. Which is a thing I have vaguely heard of but honestly cannot be said to really understand.
Two: This past weekend, I went down to the Stumptown Comic Fest for an important rite of passage – losing my first award. This didn’t bum me out too much; I found myself contemplating some clear indicators as to why I didn’t do well in a popular vote for “best new talent”. But more importantly, the day after the awards, I said hi to Phil Foglio. Who, it turns out, has been eagerly following Rita since I gave him a flier at ECCC 2012 and loves pretty much everything about it except the frequency of updates.
I’d already been thinking that it’s really time to get my work habits and Rita’s schedule back in gear; having one of my top three or four living influences give me a kick in the ass over my schedule was a hell of a reinforcement of those thoughts.
So I’m trying to make some changes in my habits and my expectations for myself. No promises. But hopefully chapter 10 will spool out a LOT quicker than 9 did.
This took a lot longer than I intended it to. I’d decided to pause for a few weeks after finishing the previous chapter, to deal with some other projects that had been sitting on the side entirely too long. But then I sprained my rib in aikido class, and spent a couple weeks mostly just sitting in the living room, playing Skyrim.
It also took a while because I dipped my toe into a new world: 3D modeling. I made a little reference maquette of the car in Silo!
I ended up getting it into Illustrator via an awkward process involving dropping a copy of the half-finished page into Silo, posing the model to match the loose sketches, then screengrabbing that and registering it with the image in Illustrator.
And then I treated the car images like any other thing on my sketch layers, and drew what you see here. I can see one or two refinements to the process – mostly, make two screengrabs of the setup in Silo, one with the page, one without, and swap them in Illustrator once I think things are registered – but that’s really it. I may also end up doing separate reference shots for future pages, with more varied perspective on the car.
This is the last page of chapter IX! At last. It hasn’t been a long one, but it took forever to draw because of life getting in the way. Now to nail down a prop I’ll be using extensively in the next chapter.
There’s a cafe in Seattle called Trabant; I was sitting there when I drew the first panel, and borrowed its name and logotype for the high-end restaurant Carol took Rita out to. If you’re ever in the U District during winter I thoroughly recommend their “Freddy Quimby”, a yummy concoction of chai and apple cider.
Also! If you’re here because you met me at the Emerald City Comic-Con the other week, then hi! (and if you went to ECCC and came home with a very green 9 of Wands card with a galaxy on the back, that’s from my personal Tarot deck that I was using for display – I’d love to have it back.)
Holy shit it’s another page! Two in one week!
I got this finished Thursday night, so I get to post it for this week. I dunno if I’ll have another one on next Thursday what with ECCC but WHAT THE HELL.
(Also – I’ll be at ECCC! Booth 2503, hidden in a corner among tattooists and autograph sellers and stuff. Next year I gotta grab a booth earlier.)
Oh man I am so glad to be uploading this page. It sat half-done for what felt like forever, as I fought seasonal depression. Several times I contemplated just deleting the entire green tier and starting again on those because I kept on looking at them and not liking them.
I bought a huge sunlamp a couple weeks ago, and it’s been helping a lot. And ultimately I decided those upper panels were fine, just unfinished, so I finished them in about an hour and a half. There was another green panel sketch up there, and a couple more brief lines of dialogue, but they just didn’t need to be there.
edit: thanks to nick for TYPO PATROL
Oh hey! It’s a page!
I’ve been sitting on this new look for Rita4 for what seems like forever, what with all the things getting in the way of actually drawing the comic lately. So it may be jumping the gun a little since she’s naked right now, but I figured I’d share my character/costume designs for her.
These are the first couple pages, where I started exploring. The idea that I wanted her to be dangerously young emerged early. And I figured I’d emphasize her smallness by giving her a tiny, exaggerated hat to contrast with the eminently practical hat her previous incarnation had been sporting. On the right is where it really started to become a Thing, with me settling on a little military-looking hat that made me think of General Jinjur, a character in the second Oz book. It’s not actually the hat that John R. Neil drew on her, but I like it more than his hat, so that’s what I stayed with.
With the hat and hair finalized, I started doodling outfits. In the end I decided to riff on Jinjur some more, and picked up a detail from the stories: her goal was to conquer Oz, and as a symbol of this, she wore a skirt colored like the four quadrants of the country. Whether or not I’ll actually show this in the comic is doubtful, what with the color restrictions involved.
Basically my goal is to play with the idea of “age”; Rita4 and her companions Tom4 and Gary4 are basically Timelords. As such they live a VERY long time with multiple regenerations – tied, in the case of Rita at least, to their hats. So Rita4 here is probably several hundred years old at this point, and yet is manifesting as a little girl. Who behaves in a very adult fashion. (Including bedroom shenanigans but trust me, those aren’t going to show up on-camera. At best there will be VERY elliptical hints that her sex life really hasn’t changed except for a few issues of basic biomechanics. Mostly you’ll just see her smoking cigarettes once she gets dressed and settles into her new persona.)
I need to go back and edit some dialogue at the beginning of Chapter VIII to establish that Rita was on her last hat and thus not expected to come back; I’d originally written it as her having one more hat left, and have since changed my mind. Good thing that chapter’s not in print yet, huh?
(Also here is a drawing of the previous hats of Rita4. I might color this for the bonus material of the second book.)
I was originally going to have some kind of funeral rite being spoken by Gary4 in the first couple of panels, but I couldn’t get something written that didn’t feel like words for the sake of words. So I went with silence.
Also, in an amusing bit of life imitating art, I lost my hat on the bus this past weekend. It hasn’t turned up in their lost and found yet; if it still hasn’t appeared by next Monday when I call them again, I’ll assume it’s gone, and go hunting for a new one. Because winter in Seattle means needing something to keep the drizzle off; everyone thinks you’re a tourist if you use an umbrella, and I’m really just not a hoodie kinda gal.
[Later: Carol’s car used to be a Mazzigatti until Nick said that sounded like a comedy knockoff of Maserati, so I found an Italian cryptographer to namecheck instead – Silvio Micali, one of the co-discoverers of zero knowledge proofs.]
I’ve been trying to push myself on the backgrounds, lately.
Here’s a closeup of the last blue panel… maybe you want a new backdrop or something.
I wasn’t intending to write and record the entirety of Tom’s “Very Sorry Song”, but it just sort of… happened. In my best attempt at a masculine voice, even.
Tom2’s shirt is a horrible bastard of a tomcat named Chingado, created by my buddy Jill C.
While this page obviously took a while to draw, surprisingly most of the time it took was spent in looking at the panel I’d marked out as “money shot of Vespa spaceport”, not in actually drawing it.
The main thing I was thinking of while drawing that panel was the Cygnus from “The Black Hole”, especially the way it was all lit up from within. Supposedly one of the main inspirations for it was Gothic cathedrals. (Skip to about 1:40 in this video to see it lit.) I wanted that sense of something massive, without it feeling dead and alone the way the Cygnus did.
Oh, and here’s a high-res copy of it if you want a new backdrop or something.
Cons are upcoming! I’ll have some art in the show at Foolscap this weekend, plus some Tarot decks and other stuff in the print store. The weekend after that, I’ll be behind a table at Rainfurrest, selling art and decks. There’s a slim chance I’ll have copies of book 1 of Rita, but I’m not holding my breath.
And here’s chapter 9.
If all goes well, the book should be off to the printer soon. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll have it in time for Rainfurrest (though I’ll have Tarot decks galore there!), but it should definitely be in my hands by the time I go off to APE.
I learnt a lot while putting the book together. Hopefully book 2 will go together a lot faster, since I’ll have actually done it before.
Woo. The first page back after that website-rebuilding hiatus is a heck of a downer, isn’t it? Sorry about that!
The 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.
Here’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 183327sApparently 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
Megaera’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.
