The night deepens - Of Dragon and Woman #24

<-- | <-> | -->

Just a simple splash page full of moody colors and nearly abstract vistas, I said. It'll look good but it won't take but a day, I said. Actually it didn't, the first time. Except I don't know how to photoshop and I could not get rid of the pixelated white lines in between the sky, the woods, the swamp, the cliff, the three trunk and the crown left by the magic wand tool and had to start over. What you got to do, you see, is paint in those lines while you've still got basic blocks of color to work with.

Alternatively, paint black ink outlines on things like a regular normal comic book artist.

But then, after wringing my hands for the rest of the day and then doing it all over again, I pressed the wrong button and lost all control of photoshop and had to reboot it and lost about half of the picture again. I was sure I had saved pretty recently, too. 

So anyway, I hope knowing the struggle of bringing this thing from in my head to your eyes improves it. It's an important page to me. I even saved you a larger, word balloon-less version.

If you want, dear reader, I'd like to hear a story about the first time you went somewhere that your parents didn't know about. Me, I sneaked out at night when I was eight or nine to scribble over racist graffiti on the playground. You can turn a swastika into a house, and write out mocking explanations of whatever genius abbreviations they use for slogans and/or names for their movements in your area. I had "BSS" to work with, for "Bevara Sverige Svenskt", "Preserve Sweden's Swedishness", which I turned into "Bu för Svenska Sadister". Probably don't need to translate that one. 

Somewhat clever for a nine year old I think.

Current mood/music: Nostalgic for Lemmings. I think when I got to this level, and heard this music, was one of the first times in my life I realized I didn't know anything. It was so far outside anything I expected the game to do, or any music I was familiar with. And you know kids, we didn't have the Internet in those days. I didn't have anywhere to turn to to give me the tiniest hint what was going on, what to do. I had one friend who liked videogames but Lemmings wasn't his jam. I had a videogame magazine but it hadn't occurred to me I could be one of the people writing letters to it. I had to go into this strange wild world all on my own.

One of these days I'll come up with an anecdote that's not a wildly Freudian excuse for why I'm making the exact comic I'm making.

A series of silences - Of Dragon and Woman page 21

<-- | <-> | -->

Have you ever had people you trust and depend on reveal that they think you are a monster, dear reader?

That's part of the reason this page has taken two and a half days to make. I don't know if it's because I'm more invested in the drawing or more in touch with my emotions than I used to but this feels so real to me. 

Also I'm an old man, and I tire easily. And, if you've read this far you probably know I hate straight lines - oh boy, the time and energy I put into building my janky panel borders alone - and the establishing shot demanded a wide angle on a finely built wooden house, with windows and a fence and everything. So you see the problem.

And, funny story, I got a bit further with understanding the page space than on the last page and was able to stack three pages in this one. Though it did require getting rid of a funny little bit where Rosa's dad walks by and Jenny calls him "Mr T." (Rosa's parents' names are René and Randall Triton) and now we have to live without those piping hot 1980s pop culture references.

Speaking of references, maybe I should point out that line  "Black always wins" isn't one. It's simply an observation on the nature of TV static that a five year old growing up in an ethnically homogeneous micro society almost completely cut off from the rest of the world can make, unburdened with the knowledge of what those two colors usually represent. You've got to consider the context.

Oh yeah, I mentioned something about the iron age before, didn't I? That was what we could charitably call an "oversimplification" (rather than "misdirection" or "lie"). The truth is, this village is only limited to "mostly" iron age technology because it's been many generations since anyone made it here from outside, and bog iron is all they have. It might have been more fair to draw a wind generator or two somewhere before this, but I like the understated reveal of the barely functioning TV in in what we have up to this point just assumed was a standard high fantasy setting.

One more question for you, dear reader: Do you ever watch the static looking and listening for ghosts?

Concerning concern - Of Dragon and woman page 20

<-- | <-> | -->

Several things:

It's ten o clock in the Goddamn morning as I write this. Which is nice because I haven't seen this much daylight since Saturday.

Yes, that's supposed to say "picked potatoes", not pickled. What would the smell of pickled potatoes be doing here? Jenny enjoys the fragrance of dirt sans potatoes; earth which has been used up, plundered and left with gaping holes. Even though it smells gross. Which actually opens the field up for questions to my dear reader: What's your favorite weird smell? And have you had any weird sensory reactions to shock?

Also, a large part of the process of drawing this page consisted of pacing around my apartment obsessively going over the events in my head before remembering I was supposed to draw them. Those poor girls.

The main reason it's taken eighteen hours to get this page done, however, is not the emotional burden, nor the many difficult to draw poses and exacting facial expressions. It's because the comic is drawn on a 1:2 page, that is, twice as tall as it's wide, or roughly 20% taller than you expect a sheet of paper to be. I decided on this solely to make the comic stand out - if it's published on paper, it could be either an unusually rectangular book or one with really wide margins I could fill with notes. But I didn't expect me to suddenly figure out how to use that space efficiently. This page was supposed to be two pages, I crap you not. Only when I started drawing it did I see how much room I had, and the scene went on and on, more and more decompressed, panels multiplying and still there was no end to the page. The last (and biggest) panel wasn't even scripted, it just came out of a desperate need to not leave the bottom of the page empty. Serendipitous, really, cause I think it adds a nice little bit of mood and also orientation to the scene.

In conclusion it's been a magnificent day for me, with not entirely unwelcome results, though I fear the next page may take even longer. It's even more emotionally involving, and I probably need to sleep sometime this week too.

What's crackin - Of Dragon and Woman page 18

<-- | <-> | -->

So many neat little things going on here, visually, colorially, layoutically, and some little character establishings too and even some oblique pop culture references. You'd hardly think this was drawn by someone sitting down to draw after eight hours of drawing. Just to take an example, in panel 5 we see one of those moments where the presence of the magical makes everyday life just a little bit different: Jenny can't tell a lie, and she's trying to deny being "it". Just a little thing, but can you imagine not being allowed to say "No" to things you don't like?

That being said, I'm massively irritated by Rosa's hair, by Jenny's lips (they should be a darker grey, but I can't draw lips to save my life) and by that triangle I forgot to color in panel 1, and I severely doubt the impressionistic panel 6 is working. I know, why don't you put your two cents in the comments below, or even my patreon, dear reader?

(I think I'm guerrilla marketing myself. Can you even do that?)