Dangerous Invitations

Dangerous Invitations

Oh geeze this page took entirely too long. I had it all written at the beginning of LAST week. And then I drew the first panel. Did a nice drawing of the Mattie, Reb, and Andrei clustered around the visualization of the spread of the Sunrisers’ work.

And I knew it was wrong. But I’d spent enough time on it that I was reluctant to do the right thing and abandon it. I took most of a week to decide to do that.

Of course, I also spent this week running around frantically trying to get a passport together, and when it became clear that was going to fail a mere few days too late for the impromptu European trip a friend had proposed, also going and being a stage kitten at a burlesque show. (A “stage kitten”, also known as a “pickup artist”, is the person who puts out props before an act… and comes out to pick up what’s been strewn about the stage afterwards. If she does her job right this involves showing a lot of ass now and then.) After that I spent a whole day doing nothing but lying around a quiet apartment reading.

And I ditched that panel, scaled the Earth up, and made it hopefully a bit clearer what’s going on. Because this is an Important Bit Of The Story.

Then I went to the comic shop and picked up a few things – the latest issue of Prophet (bizarre as always), the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (underwhelming), the latest issue of Atomic Robo (fun), and… a hardbound reprint of the entirety of Moebius and Jodorowsky’s Incal.

Which might explain how wide the other three panels in this page are; I’d been thinking for a few weeks that I need to start pulling my camera back and showing more of the world, and a big dose of Moebius’ drawings really made me excited about doing that. We’ll see how this affects future pages; I’ve been feeling like the stark style I draw this in makes it hard to really pull back sometimes.

Oh, and here’s that abandoned version of that first panel.

9 thoughts on “Dangerous Invitations

  1. They’ve just read “Pretty Vespuline’s” (Rita1’s?) memories and want to tell her something *about* those memories? I guess they’ve deduced something that Rita1 & company have not, such as the timeline for the Sunrisers.

    • Nah, that’s not what I intended. Guess my storytelling got a little too oblique here. Again. This happens sometimes. I’m glad you said something while i’m still in the middle of editing volume 2 before going to print!

      If I change the HUD in the third panel to something like “Straylight/Vespuline Mining Concern/350s” does that change your reading of this page?

      • I don’t think so?

        In the first panel I see a simulation that Mattie, Red, and Andrei are looking at, showing a projection of the Sunrisers’ attempt to make what I assume to be a global hive mind. I interpret this as a new discovery on their part.

        The second panel shows the trio gongoozling, and the text indicates they want to tell “Pretty Vespuline” about this — either I’m wrong in assuming that’s their name for Rita1, or they think she doesn’t know about the Sunrisers — or I’ve misunderstood what they’re talking about in the first panel.

        In the third panel they’re arriving at Straylight, which I guess is the Vespuline “home base”.

        • Hmm. “Pretty Vespuline” is intended to be their name for “the entire Vespuline hive-mind”. I’ll have to see if I can tweak this page to make that more obvious.

          Your interpretations of panels 1 and 3 are what I want them to be, but I’m not communicating my intent properly in 2. Hmm. Maybe if I keep the “three overlapping bits of dialogue” theme going in panel 2, and have them saying something like “Our overmind needs to know about this/Pretty Vespuline needs to know about this/[some other name for the hive] needs to know about this”.

          Thanks a lot for letting me know about these kinds of things!

          • Ah! I think my confusion stemmed from the first “pretty vespuline goes ping <3". I missed that Rita sends a ping response, so I guess I thought they had picked up a periodic ping from *her* in the first place.

          • Huzzah!

            I think I’m still gonna edit the dialogue on this page, so that anyone else who missed that ping response will hopefully get the proper reading. I might also try to tweak the sequence of dialogue in the page where Rita auto-responds to the Vesp ping and starts a data dump; that’s a dense exchange.

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