Page 164

Page 164

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At long last! It’s THAT PAGE.

This is the end of chapter 14; next up is chapter 25, unless I decide to add one more page here to make the narrative point that this chapter cuts off before Rita makes her choice.

page 153

page 153

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I learnt the very basics of After Effects to do the glitched out text. Don’t worry if you can’t read the center text; it’s not supposed to be legible. You should be able to get some idea of the top and bottom text, though.

In the print version, of course, this text will just be in spot gloss.

 

(Also thanks to STriker for shaving the file size on this almost in half!)

Need-To-Know Basis

Need-To-Know Basis

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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.

buffer overflow // restarting, please wait…

buffer overflow // restarting, please wait…

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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, facebookrss 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.

Dangerous Invitations

Dangerous Invitations

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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.

Delicious Cake

Delicious Cake

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This is the cake recipe Reb is pulling up.

Nobody in the Belt really knows why any more, but this is the traditional cake to bake when you wish to dispel suspicion that you are a malevolent AI. Yes, this is a thing that happens often enough that people have a traditional “I’m Not An Evil AI, No, Really” gift.

Choose Your Destination

Choose Your Destination

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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  183327s

Apparently 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

The Collective

The Collective

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There is a layer in this page called “I thought I was done drawing bookshelves when I finished chapter 1 of Absinthe”. It contains abstracted books, cut and paste from that comic.

“Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” – Wally Wood

Also, Mattie’s shape is inspired by some of the work of master photomanipulator J. K. Potter, most specifically his portrait of Lydia Lunch.