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.
