I spent all damn day hacking on the web site. Went down some blind alleys, learnt a few things that I’m sure I’ll promptly forget. But it now subtly adapts the size of the pages if your browser is a little too small for them to fit on screen, urges you to scroll to the right with some big arrows, and if you’re one of those people who thinks using anything but your up-and-down scroll wheel to scroll is Just plain Wrong, you can click on the pages to smoothly scroll to the next one.

Now is the time when I collapse in the bean bag chair and blow some imaginary shit up.

It was one of those days where I woke up late, after waking up early from funky dreams and going back to sleep. I went out for some errands and tried to get some work done on Rita, but couldn’t seem to make myself focus. I came home and realized I needed some FOOD before going to aikido class, and that I was too short on time to manage it before I needed to run off to class, so I’m punting on aikido tonight.

But on the other hand I do now have names for all the tiers in the Rita kickstarter. I’ve decided I’m going to edit in some imagery for the video, and I kinda wonder if wanting to do that in the back of my head is why I got so little done while out at the cafe – when my brain Wants To Do A Thing, it’s really hard to make it do anything else. I might work on that now that I’m at home instead of in a place where making lots of repetitive noise will drive people crazy. Oooh, and I also need to draw the cover for book 2 so I can use it as the still image for the KS video.

Also while digging around for ideas for tier names, I ran across a rap song about Alice and Bob.

I wish I’d managed to come up with an appropriate tier for the name “Bruce Schneier Facts” but some things just are not meant to be.

Four pages left to draw before book 2 is done. I’m seriously thinking about taking a break for a couple weeks after that happens, so I can have something like a vacation. Especially with (a) a trip to New Orleans coming up and (b) Saints Row 4 coming out. yes I know I’ve talked about how I generally try to avoid games that are about Pushing The Hurt Button for days and days of gameplay, but how can I resist a game with a dubstep cannon. Not that said vacation won’t have the Kickstarter hanging over it, but I’m reasonably confident that the second time around will be a LOT less stressful.

I’ve been fooling around with the Saint’s Row 4 character generator. I decided to do what I’d done with SR3 and play as Rita. I’ve got several versions up on the site; if you have a desire to run around Steelport as Rita, check ’em out.

Rita Perelmann, all dressed up for being the president.
Rita Hatt
Ritamyriax yes this is what a dragoness wears when she’s president, are YOU gonna argue with her?

And while I’m at it here’s the version from SR3, which I only played as Rita 1.
SR3 Rita Perelmann
SR3 Rita Perelmann #2 (after I downloaded the vampire DLC; most of the time at this point I ran around with the tit size a lot closer to max)

I’ve got a first cut of the video for the Rita 2 Kickstarter. I’ve got a mostly-finalized list of the tiers, too. I need snappy names for a couple of them, though. Any suggestions?

Offsite Backup: $1, PDF of books 1/2.

Paper Trail: $25, The book, PDFs.

Parallel Processing: $38, Three discounted copies of the book, for comic shops only.

Zero Knowledge Proof: $45, Signed book, some postcards, PDFs.

Privilege Escalation: $60, signed book, postcards, PDFs, drawing in book – only five, this is for early birds.

Unnamed With Drawing: $80, same as Privilege Escalation. I might not do this one. I’ll also probably put a limit on this one.

Unnamed Text Sponsor: $120, text sponsorship, drawing in book, etc.

Unnamed Image Sponsor: $160, small image sponsorship, drawing in book, etc

Panopticon: $300, large image sponsorship, drawing in book, etc.

Error Correction: $400, your name (subject to approval) and an appropriate pronoun replace the glitched text on this page. Large image sponsorship (same as Panopticon) plus all the other stuff.

I’m debating if I need to do a cool montage of pages at the beginning of this one’s video like I did for the first one, or if just me talking enthusiastically at the camera about the comic is enough. Dunno.

I just roughed out the last few pages of book 2 of Rita. It’s going to be 58 pages of story, which is two more than book one. Which I think means book two will be the same size, with almost exactly the same front/backmatter, except no “Ask Rita” this time.

And I guess that means it’s time to nail down my quotes and rough shipping date estimates, and put the Kickstarter video together. I’m thinking I’ll try to launch that sometime next week. Then all I have to do is prepare the files for printing, which should be a lot easier the second time around. The big thing to do is some edits for clarity I want to do on the dance routine in chapter X – I need to make it clear Rita 2 is pretending to stab herself, not actually stabbing herself, and see how it works if I run some music over the whole thing to make it clear it’s a dance number. Plus I have to go through and make sure all the spot gloss is set up properly, and consider adding a little more here and there. I’m sure that doing all of this will eat up the one-week buffer I currently have, and probably slow production of the start of book 3 down. But at least I think I’ve limited the sketches enough that I won’t take like three months in the middle of winter to get those done instead of drawing pages. Which also might mean that I’ll have book 3 done a little earlier, in time for Rainfurrest.

Damn. Book two. I can’t believe I’ve managed to get this far on so big a project. And I really can’t see any reason why book three won’t be happening in another year or so, barring complete and utter catastrophe. I’m happy.

When it’s all done, my reward? Draw more comics. What else?

I got some email today from the folks at Phoenix Comics down in Capitol Hill. Seems the four books I brought down there a couple weeks ago are already sold out, and they’d like another half dozen. That’s in addition to the three they sold the other month.

I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that it’s being displayed pretty prominently in their “local comics” section, and that everyone who works in the shop right now is to some degree a fan of my work. Plus Cap Hill is the gay part of town, and there’s a lot of casual gayness in Rita.. But sheeiit. I must be doing something right for it to be moving like that.

I guess there’s a definite niche for a story about a queer robot lady with reality troubles. If I’m lucky maybe it’s even a significantly-sized one.

And if I’m really lucky I’ll only lose about 50% of the audience that likes Rita when my next projects are furry porn and dark urban fantasy, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Omfg chapter X of Decrypting Rita is FINALLY DONE. If you want to catch up then go back to here to read the whole chapter. At 17 pages, it’s the longest one so far, and probably the longest one in the entire story – I’ve got most of book 3 planned out and nothing looks to be anywhere near this long.

This also means that it’s probably time to get moving on the Kickstarter. There’s one more chapter in book 3, but it’s about eight pages, with a fairly low panels-per-page count (especially compared to the last few pages of this one, which ranged from 7-12 panels per page), so I should have no problems getting it done during the month-long span of a campaign. I also want to do some editing to a few things in this last chapter, and of course there’s going to be a pass of considering where spot gloss belongs.

In other Rita news, yesterday I dropped by Phoenix Comics in Capitol Hill. It’s run by some friends of mine, who’d asked for a few copies of Rita last month; turns out the last of the three copies had just sold a couple days ago, and they wanted more! So I’ll be dropping off four more sometime soon.

Also here is a cool thing: Jim Steranko did a comics adaptation of the 1981 SF movie “Outland”. It ran in Heavy Metal over six months, then was collected – but only in France. He drew it almost entirely in double-page spreads, with lots of huge drawings balanced against rows of smaller ones. If I’d seen this before starting Rita, I might have done some different panel rhythms – and I still might swipe from it for the final volume. Which is kind of coming full circle; the initial flash of Rita climbing up the side of a building, rendered very starkly and bluely, came when I was in the shower after reading an article talking about the first issue of Steranko’s run on “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD”. I guess maybe if I ever run into him at a con I should say “hey thanks for the inspiration” and pass him a copy or something.

Here’s a zip of the whole thing.

I continue to be very, very happy that I have 3D rotation tools available in Illustrator. And, for that matter, that I can use Photoshop to place reference models. Drawing this comic is a pain sometimes, but it’d be even more of one if I had to do all these complicated 3D transformations myself. Or else it’d be a LOT LESS COMPLICATED.

(Realistically, if I didn’t have Illustrator, I might not be drawing this comic in the first place. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’d look like in pre-digital processes, for instance. I’m not sure it’d even exist if that’s all I had.)

I keep on oscillating between “this will never be done” and “the end is in sight” on Rita. Realistically it’s more the second; I’m past the midpoint, about 20 pages from the end of book 2 and pretty hopeful that book 3 won’t be much longer than 1 and 2. And I’ve structured the Kickstarter rewards for book 2 to have a hard limit on how many sketches I’ll have that’s less than what I had for book 1.

But still. I just set up page 97 of a ~170 page story. It’s taken me two years to get this far. Comics are slooowwww.

It’s a beautiful day! I should take my computer out to the park and work on the next page of Rita.

But first I need a shower.

Start thinking about Kickstarter stuff in the shower.

Get out and start filling out the first draft of the new campaign on the site. Oh god I need to come up with a tweet-length description of book 2. Later for that. Name most of the tentative levels, send off email to the printer I used last time asking what kind of cool printing tricks could be done to the cover as stretch goals. Hope for glow-in-the-dark ink as a possibility.

Oh man it’s one o’clock wasn’t I gonna go OUT? I’m not even DRESSED.