Wot U Think? Vixen 4 (Spoilers!)

Warning: Spoilers for Vixen 4 below. 

So it's been a few days since Vixen 4 was sent out, I'm wondering what your reaction was. The first half was a pretty typical evil giantess/growth comic, the second half... less so. I wanted to talk about what was going on there and why I decided to do things how I did, which I'll go into below. (There will be spoilers; If you haven't read Vixen 4, you should probably stop reading now.)

So all the way back in the beginning of Vixen 1, an ancient being was released from an ankh, and took over the body of Emily. That was sort of glossed over for most of parts 2 and 3, so in part 4 I decided I wanted to re-introduce that element back into the story.

This whole time Emily has been a prisoner in her own mind, semi-conscious unable to control her body. The entity that inhabited her body couldn't get rid of Emily's mind/soul, at least not easily, so it pushed it aside. In the second half of Vixen 4, I wanted to show that state. Emily is in a place that's a kind of semi-corporeal realization of their psychological states.  She's stuck watching what's essentially a movie of everything the entity is making her do, powerless to stop it.

Emily manages to momentarily take control of her body before quickly losing it. The entity takes her assertiveness as a threat, and gets hostile; while it had just pushed her aside previously, it's not actively fighting to take over Emily's mind. And that's when things start to get weird. The entity tries to overwhelm Emily, essentially burrowing into her mind overwhelm her mental faculties, forcing her into submission. This is shown from Emily's POV, so we see a series of oddities and intentional "glitches," culminating in a few surreal pages that are black except for distorted text and creepy yellow eyes. Then, Emily frees herself, and wakes up in the realm where she was kept prisoner, an endless void above a glassy "sea of stars," where ghost-like souls wander.

The idea, and look of the area was inspired by a number of different things. Among them: Get Out's The Sunken Place, Under the Skin's horrifying void-like processing chamber, and the Astral Plane from FX's Legion. The surreal, text-heavy section where Emily fights the entity's influence was a last-minute addition that I put together over several hours. Most of the weird pictures are heavily photoshopped versions of images from earlier chapters of the comic (and one image that won't appear until next chapter!) That section cribbed VERY heavily from Neil Gaiman's brilliant comic series The Sandman, which also had a lot of surreal dream battles conveyed through avant-gard combinations of surreal images and text.

Here's one example (top part is probably the most direct inspiration)
And another.  And another. (God I love The Sandman! Seriously, go out and read it if you get a chance.)

So yeah, sandwiched in the middle of a fairly normal giantess comic was a fairly surreal dream sequence. Hopefully it made sense, and hopefully everyone enjoyed the comic as a whole!