If you could make your hair do that you would too

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Yes, the comic is one week late this week. I probably need to push myself harder.

I have a story about that, actually. How I hurt my back rediscovering the thrill of life:

I've been walking the forest trail next to my house at night for a while. Trying to make it a regular thing, for the exercise. It's two kilometers of twisting dirt path, covered in pine needles. No sign of human life if you go there at 2 AM. I find it pleasant. This night, some ten days ago, I decided to take my exercise to the next level: Light jogging. After ten minutes of breathing hard I saw the first sunlight hit the crowns of the trees and felt fine, except my legs were burning with the effort of holding my speed back to the minimum I judged I could handle to keep it up through the whole trail. So I went faster.

Before I really thought about what I was doing, I was running as fast as I physically could, desperately mindful of the ground right in front of me to place my bare feet away from roots and pinecones. I was keenly aware of how easily I could seriously hurt myself - one time I have found broken glass on the path, and since I went over 110 kilos I have felt I could as easily break my ankles as twist them. And I was able to find some kind of steel under all this fat. Steel that once upon a time let me walk a slack rope five meters over the ground, let me sit down and untangle my foot when caught under water and out of breath, let me make decisions faster than I could think at times when I had to save life and limb.

I had almost forgotten how easy it is to be in this state of genuine fear. Everything's so clear, everything fits together. The faster I move, the better. You can see how one could get addicted to it. I now have to weigh my motivation to get in shape against my fear of addiction.

But anyway, then I couldn't sit straight for the rest of the week.

So, notes on the comic:

*Anna Regn's hair has probably grown more than can be justified by moving the air around it to give it volume. I just like drawing it.

*The twins tend to stand in this order: Leon left, Anna Regn right. They started doing it just to keep people from mixing them up, but there's probably some symbolic significance in the particular order they choose. 

*The existential conflict between the lasting and the ephemeral is probably not going to cause as much drama as it could, despite the twins's fundamental difference in artistic doctrine. 

*Anna Regn clearly can't help herself from pointing fingers at the camera at the slightest provocation. Stop it. Nobody likes a foreshorteninger. 

*I still don't have a real model for how these characters should look. In fact I don't even know how their noses work. But at least I have a vague system for word balloon shapes to convey voice. And those faces in panel 8 are p. great. If I may say so myself.

*Leon's on like four or five levels of irony when she quotes Monica Geller's catchphrase "I know!" Kids watch old TV shows in different ways than we did. But I mention this just so you can hear it in that voice.

PS. It's come to my attention the comic may appear shrunk on some monitors. This raises several questions, and having done everything I can to answer them my conclusion is: I miss having websites that would only put code in your pages if you wrote that code, and if you're not seeing 1000 pixels wide comics try clicking on the image. (This should take you to imgur, where you have to click the image again to see it in full size.) (Sigh.)

Progress update

My bones feel like old fiberglass, except for the base of my spine. It feels like broken actual glass, and keeps me from drawing. Based on past experience, I'll probably be able to put together the next page before the end of the week. I really want to, which makes a difference. But in the meantime here's a peek.

I hope you appreciate how self-conscious I feel showing you this, dear reader. If the finished comic is like baring my body and soul this is like showing my body, my soul and a MRI displaying their inner workings in detail I don' even understand.

Ephemeral entertainment

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Nothing much happening here. It's not even a good establishing shot of the Farber property. But that's how it turned out to Anna Regn in this exact pose, which is important because it's a reference I'm sure like two people in the entire world could get.

Easy there Grabby, that camera was her birthday present

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I feel like I've learned a lot in drawing these three pages. It would be such satisfaction to go back and start over. Like so many times before. Maybe this time I'd look up how a videocamera looks.

But no. Let's keep moving forward.

(She said, before noticing she forgot to color any hair on page 2.)

Everything Changes 2: Judgment Day

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Industry wisdom (or at least a thing Mr. Warren Ellis said once) suggests you get three pages to hook a reader on a comic. So why don't I spend the whole second page trying to pull off foreshortening, perspectives and a sense of fluid motion and doing nothing to convey plot or characters? Well, almost nothing. There is a chance some nuances of body language and facial expressions come across, I guess.

So the hardest part of this page, aside from the constant struggle with the demon Perfectionism, was thinking up this series of mid-air poses and the angles from which to show them. She's trying to do everything at once, but awkwardly, still finding her, uh, air legs. As one does when one suddenly can fly.

Also, when drawing full body shots of airborne children there's no cheats and no shortcuts. You have to know how tall they are. How long both of their legs are. There's no other way to make their proportions consistent. Identical twins makes this twice as scary.

I expect many readers here wonder what identical twins I'm talking about. See now how cleverly I've used my artistic ineptness to pull you along to the next page, dear reader.

That moment when everything changes

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Eighteen years I've been working on this story, and I can still find new, better points to start it. So let's try one more time. The worst thing that can happen is the comic fails to connect with any readers and stall out again.

Speaking of which, dear reader, please do drop a comment or an email or a tweet or something to let me know if what I do here means anything to you. Even better, make me obliged to keep doing it through Patreon.

So what can we say about what's going on here? First of all, any symbolism in panel 8 is entirely accidental. I honestly didn't see any metaphors for puberty until after I'd finished drawing it. It just seemed like the obvious way to frame and angle that shot to give it an impact fitting the discovery of magic powers.

And here I thought I didn't have any instinct for visual storytelling.

The sculpture on the tiny work table (faithfully copied from my high school memory) is supposed to look like it's supposed to look like a fire, and also a little bit like a flower. Leon has a lot of ambition but not yet a lot of vision.

Marble, while expensive and surrounded by a fancy reputation, is a brittle stone that's easy to practice carving with. Which, you'll probably break it and ruin whatever you wanted to make, but you can quickly make noticeable progress, compared to let's say granite that takes literally days to show any marks from a chisel.

(Granite is my and Leon's favorite material.) 

Drawing hands interacting with and intersecting with stone is really hard. This page took two and a half days to make. And that's me trying to simplify my style so I don't spend three days on every page.

How to make business associates and influence people

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And scene.