<> Vx 1-10

24.3.6: Ye Beastie.

  1. Be forthwith and unafraid of the luminous angels you may meet. You can recognize them by their colors: white with a blue-and-silver halo, black with a halo of golden spiderwebs, and maroon with a small measure of crystalline halos are the most common. Refer to appendix 24.18 for further details on less-common tranches of angels.
  2. Thou wilt know the Keepers by their blue-and-silver halo. Keepers may assume many forms during the course of their duties, and are like the furnace of a star if not pacified. To greet a Keeper, vibrate S?QGt’VGOOf, and pet its snoot in your friendliest manner.

— VX6, Codex Serenissima, Fourteenth Revision (completely depreciated in VX8)

<> Vx 1-13

It took me a while but I finally figured out what to make buildings inside the giant space station look like. Basically I looked at the sixties SF cover work of Richard Powers, thought about how he was probably going about making it happen in paint, and tried to do the same kind of thing in Illustrator.

I may be going back into previous pages and redoing some of the buildings before I declare this chapter well and truly “finished”.

<> VX 1-15

Olivia has a big dose of that kind of impetuosity that usually only works out if you’re the heroine of a YA novel. One of these days it’s gonna backfire on her.

The bottom panel owes a ton to the cover illustration for a Tim Zahn short story I read in the eighties. Standing at the center of a big X of alternate versions of yourself was a side effect of a warp drive in this story.

<More to come - we're drawing new pages as fast as we can!
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<> Mix 1-6

Drawing this comic has really weird rhythms. I took this page from script to finished in three days, but there’s a page before it that took something like an entire week.

I try to make a habit of turning as much as possible into reusable elements. All those little fairy bells, for instance, are drawn with a handful of graphic styles – one for the stem, another for the leaves, and another for the actual flower. I can just pick that out of the style palette, make a quick dash with my stylus, and there it is. It’s coming up with all these things in the first place that takes ages, sometimes.

<> Mix 1-7

This page took seventeen forevers and I think it was worth it.

The musical notes coming out of the plants came in at the very end and really tied it all together with Noa’s whistling in the first panel. This whole fairy garden hums and chimes; I imagine the overall effect as being something like the bridge of the Enterprise, with all its reassuring little bloops and bleeps and wibbles. You don’t notice it after a little while – but you sure notice when it stops, or when a dissonant note intrudes.

I do not think it is a spoiler to say there will be dissonant notes intruding on this before the chapter is done.

<> Mix 1-9

My, there sure is a pattern set up in this page that the last panel breaks, isn’t there? I can’t be foreshadowing anything. I’m sure absolutely nothing is going to happen, and that Noa will not be watching his boyfriend die for the sixth time in this trip. They’re just going to sit here and do their gardening and maybe find the meaning of life on this ancient space station.

<> Mix 1-12

Time to switch back to Noa and Kirt for a while. I’ve been working on this page and the next one for quite some time – I think I started it in early October of last year and it’s early May now. Admittedly I did spend most of March and April moving from Seattle to New Orleans but that’s still a long time for a spread to take!

Right now I’ve got five more Mixolyne pages with full roughs lined up. They’re mostly character art, without much new background design to do, so that should help them come out a lot faster.

<> Mix 1-45

In which there is Home.

 

And in which there will be a dearth of new pages for a while again: this side of chapter 1 is complete, but there are about a dozen pages left to finish on the Vek10 side. If you’d like to see them in their current state, along with the ten or so finished pages sprinkled among them, then you can support me on Patreon. Or you can wait for a few months and see them start appearing; I seem to be working on this again after a long span of time where everything around me felt too broken for big projects. 2020 was a hell of a year, y’know?

<More to come - we're drawing new pages as fast as we can!
If you're enjoying this comic, please consider supporting us on Patreon, or telling your friends and/or favorite tastemakers about it. Thanks!
Feel like something's missing? Click here for the other side of the story.