hi I just came home from the work session at the bar and I didn’t actually eat anything today so one glass of cider got me pretty wasted. Also I finished a page before I got all wasted. Don’t worry it was already half done when I started drinking.
Up next: That One Page In Chapter 14.
This is a monologue I’ve been working towards since, oooh, chapter VII or thereabouts. It will continue for the next couple of pages, culminating in an unglitched version of that page you’ve been seeing hints of for the entire third volume of the story.
Folks who are supporting the comic on Patreon can see an unglitched version of this page here. Everyone else will have to wait something like 15-20 pages.
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.
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.
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.
If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the Vespulines have been coming since the very first page of this chapter.
This is in part because I went back and added them in the background of the previous page – but they’re the tiny little dots changing in the very first panels of this chapter. So many things to keep track of!
Further Confusion website: Done, barring one little tweak.
Feast Yer Eyes submission: Done.
Less projects hanging around means less time sitting around going OH GOD WHAT AM I GOING TO WORK ON NOW EVERYTHING IS HIGH PRIORITY. Plus the deadline-pushing of those two finished projects seems to have reminded me that yes, I can focus on drawing stuff for several hours in a row, which is only going to help the schedule for Rita!
Coincidence corner: This the 64th page of this graphic novel. As I was working on the last couple of panels, iTunes started playing the soundtrack to the Beatles movie “Yellow Submarine”. Which includes “When I’m 64”. I swear the mention of “lovely, Rita” in the flashback dialogue was wholly unintentional!
Also it greatly amuses me that Megaera’s roar has a bit of a French accent. The green world is sort of a tribute to French fantasy comics, after all. (And to Doctor Who but that’s another matter entirely.)
Future page status: blue world has rough scripts and even some thumbnails and incidental character designs for the next three pages, green world has rough scripts for one page and outlines for the next 3-4. Will there be another page this week? I hope so!
I decided to document a bit of my process for this one. I also did most of it out on the hill in Gasworks Park – I love having a laptop!
Click on the thumbnails for full-size, of course.
The first thing I do is make a new file from my template. The dark blue lines are panel border guides, the light blue ones are the text-safe area. I have a gutter down the middle of the text-safe area because when I go to print, each page becomes a spread, so I don’t want to put text across that by accident. The template also has my color palette in its swatches, and a bunch of word balloons on the dialogue layer outside of the page, so I can just say “I need a normal dialogue balloon”, “I need an encrypted dialogue balloon”, “I need some HUD text” or whatever and drag a copy into the image area.
If I’m not doing an action sequence, I start with the dialogue. I usually have a rough idea of what it should be, but I don’t bother finalizing it until I’m working on the page. Sometimes the panel layout is first; I even have thumbnails hanging around that are nothing but panel flow from one page to the next.
After I’ve got the dialogue down, I rough in the action. This page is a bit unusual in that I used a photograph of something I’d previously scrawled in my sketchbook in pen; 99% of the time, I rough stuff out in Illustrator. Sometimes I do it in lines, sometimes I do it in rough sloppy shapes.
Most of the time I work from front to back. The figure is almost always the most important part of the panel; I compose the lights and darks of the background around it. Also, hooray for pattern fills on Rita’s skirt – that’s the same pattern I was using on her gloves, for the first appearances of Skylands Rita.
The figures are pretty much done here. And the bottom panels are definitely done; I was able to knock the out really, really quickly by cutting and pasting stuff from the middle of chapter 5. I generally prefer to draw stuff fresh instead of cut and paste, but if I can copy over a complicated machine I will totally do it. (Also note that Gary’s last line has been edited a little. I felt the new phrasing gave him a little more of an English feel; the green storyline is kind of me doing a riff on the countless hours of Doctor Who I watched in my teens and twenties.)
And finally I add in some background details. The big note in the sky is because I was closing the laptop to go back home, and didn’t want to glance at this page and think it was done.
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.
I was really tempted to slack off and finish this Tuesday but, well, I got started on this one late because I spent a couple hours on the phone with one of my idols. And one thing I am continually amazed by when we talk about getting stuff done is HOW FAST HE IS.
So, you know, I let myself take some breaks and browse the web a bit, but I kept on thinking, man, Matt Howarth wouldn’t be doing this, he’d just be sittin’ there at his desk, chain-smoking and drawing up a storm. So I ended up making myself stay up late enough to finish this page.
There is a growing part of me that wants to go back and make the expressions of the earlier pages a bit wilder; I really feel like I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with all these characters as time goes on. But I’d rather press forwards and keep telling the story. Speaking of which, there should be EXPLANATIONS forthcoming for both of the on-stage Ritas next page!
Also I got my first rejection letter from a publisher for this project. IT’S A REAL THING NOW.
Any guesses as to which agency is going to cover a new window at McMillian’s? So many possibilities.
I had to do most of the bottom left panel twice due to Illustrator crashing on me. Sadface. Variable-width strokes are now on the list of Stuff To Save Before Blending.