I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
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This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under comic.
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February 25th, 2008 at 11:56 am
I have a superblow gumball. What do you have?
February 25th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
So this is what I meant by, “If tis was a regular comic, I wouldn’t have had as much to say because the next page would be right there.” I’m leaning now towards this being a third individual interested in the same item. With the comment about “friends in high places”, I wonder if it is someone other than Thirteen that he is talking about.
February 25th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Almost forgot, the gloves are definitely more brown on Tassin for this page, so it helps a lot with character identification. I’m guessing that comment should go to the artist; thanks for making it easier for the readers there:-)
February 26th, 2008 at 5:12 am
Thank you. I try.
The color coding got a bit lost in the lighting on the last page. I realized too late that there was the possibility for confusion in a scene playing in a dark hallway with two veiled characters in similar heavy gloves not talking to each other. Another lesson learned.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Sometimes coloring tricks like that can come in handy. I always remember those old 80’s Marvel comics where occasionally you would have a scenario like this:
Heroes are fighting a bunch of bad guys and then suddenly (on the last or close to last page) the main unknown bad guy comes and zaps everyone, leaving the heroes unconscious. So that panel would show kind of an “under the shoulder” view of the main bad guy so that you could just see an arm and maybe part of the back in the foreground and the unconscious characters in the background. You end up with a cliffhanger effect where you aren’t completely sure who the bad guy was, but based on the clothing hints, you can narrow it down to a handful of characters. I also used to see things like that in covers when a new bad guy was introduced or a “surprise” character appeared.
So although it might have been a mistake in the previous page, it can be a handy effect when used properly I think:-)
February 26th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Hmm, are we that evil?
February 27th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Whoo, the POOF! -marble is back.
But hey, where’s the POOF! sound effect? Why BLOFF? Is it more liquid this time?
February 27th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
define “evil”
February 28th, 2008 at 6:32 am
Re: Evil, Inasmuch as possible given our plans for the plot, I would like the reader to know what they’re looking at. It doesn’t strike me that the upper left corner of someone’s glove should ever be as much as we would want to reveal about a character in a scene. Always we should let people know WHAT IS HAPPENING and the mystery should be WHY IT IS HAPPENING. Sure, we’ve once already left the scene at the last moment, but I guess I would rather people get a clear picture for a limited time than get an obscured picture that runs from beginning to end.
Also Jaen, my favorite on that page was the “WOCK.”
February 28th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
This early into the story isn’t the time to throw in a “mystery character”; every character up to this point is really a mystery, so the story/ art mechanic doesn’t fit. Once you have fleshed out the characters and the story, you can have characters doing things that you wouldn’t expect, and that would be where you might use an artistic approach like the “hidden character” panel. You brought up the ideas of thinking about “what is happening” versus “why is this happening”. Each one of those ideas has a role in just about any story. If you read a mystery and knew exactly who the bad guy was, it might not be so interesting. Along those same lines, if you read a mystery and didn’t know what was going on, then you probably wouldn’t enjoy it either. Sometimes not knowing who is pulling the strings forces the reader to think about why the events are taking place the way they are. If I know that Thirteen wants the dragon to defeat the king and has hired someone to steal it, would that be a more thought provoking scenario than knowing Thirteen is interested in the dragon and a second individual is interested in it also but not knowing that the second person’s strings are being pulled by Thirteen? Let’s say that Thirteen is looking for the item and sees the second guy escaping with it but doesn’t stop him. If I know he works for Thirteen, I would just say, “Oh, his guy has it so no worries.” If I don’t know he works for Thirteen then I say, “I wonder why Thirteen didn’t catch him and take it? Does he know that guy can’t use it? Does he plan to meet him at a different location and take it?”
This kind of reminds me of the political aspects of the Star Wars movies (Episodes 1-3). If we hadn’t known that Palpatine was the emperor, it would have caused the audience to think more about why he was taking his actions. Because we “knew the future”, there was no political intrigue at all in the movies. It’s almost as if, because we know that Palpatine is bad, that if he had been just a shadow figure for the first two episodes and only made a real appearance in Ep. 3, there would have been a lot more thought as to why the situations were playing out the way they did. This actually seems to be a pretty common plot device in the Star Wars novels too. Some insignificant event takes place but it really underlies a larger plot that you are unaware of usually because you don’t know all the players.
Where’s the WOCK?
February 28th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
“Wock” didn’t make it into this version of the strip, unfortunately. You’ll find it on the old page 3 in the extras section eventually.
Let me just say I hope to be able to give a very clear image of what is happening and at least a sense of why - at this point in the story, introduction, buildup and familiarization with the characters is the primary goal, but at the same time we’re starting to open the story up to questions. We are of course deliberately withholding information to keep the story interesting as you learn more and more about the Why it happens over time. The key problem here is finding the right balance of what we say vs. what we don’t.
February 28th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
..while at the same time moving things along action-wise.
Also, WOCK should already be in the extras section. Just click on the last page “version 1″ and that will take you to the entire first scene in all of its crosshatched glory. Rumor has it that Riess stalked the morgues and funeral parlors of Vienna at night looking for replacement tendons during this part of the comic.
Thanks for your comments, Tory. That’s worth keeping in mind as I start writing again, which will be, oh, sometime this summer I guess.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Well the thumbnail is there. But the links don’t work. : [
Speaking of differentiation, what about colored text like in the library strips with Thirteen?
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:28 pm
rather, it just struck me that you used that method earlier, but not here. I was wondering if that was something that was gonna continue or not. I just realized that question was rather…open ended. Heh.
March 2nd, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I will continue using it in situations similar to its first use, i.e. voice over disconnected visuals, and narration.