Page Commentary No. 243

Psu: Guys. This page is nuts.

Brellom: It is pretty nutty.

Gunwild: It's a lotta panels!

Psu: It's also kinda clever. Like, I forgot how many tricks I had to pull to get this one together, and a lot of it was helped by the scripting too. The panels have panels within panels.

Brellom: That is neat. I hadn't noticed that before.

Gunwild: It's rough to ask an artist to do a buncha background detail like this.

Brellom: Good thing there were two of us!

Psu: Brell was a huge help in getting this one out there. When it came to actually laying it out though, it was important to make sure the information flowed together. And I had to utilize a number of fun little tricks that I'm not too sure people noticed at first. But this page has so many of those "panels within panels" that I talked about on a previous page. Like... the first panel has FIVE distinct scenes between actors. And each one is framed by the actions of another character that's closer to the camera.

Brellom: This is the page where I start to do a lot more heavy lifting. I can see where I'm being a lot more liberal with the soft edges on the characters in order to better fuse Psu and my rendering styles. Psu did all the fancy effects though. I think the pages which follow are among the strongest in the entire comic. I did a lot of the basic rendering for the characters, allowing Psu to put in a lot more details and deal with other scene direction stuff, like all the fancy colours and stuff that become a trend for the rest of the chapter. Like that panel with the shattering wall. Man that looks like a lot of work!

Gunwild: My favorite thing in the world of comic art is when someone fires a gun in such quick succession that there are multiple muzzle flashes closely grouped together.

Psu: Color was really important for telling the story too.. Like giving Kitty a color with that blue, helped the reader locate Kitty as his visuals moved between the virtual world and the real world. Thining about this page. It takes place between TWO different dimensions but they practically occupy the same space. Kitty running from the dog had to be represented in the same space where Minx could pick him up. So one thing I did, especially for panels 4-8, I had to utilize the positions of where Minx and Kitty and Wolfstar where in their panels.

Psu: I think we're kinda talking over each other. I'm kinda gushing over my work. But really Brell's work in laying down the basic colors and shading really helped make all these glowing effects so much easier to implement. And yeah, I am pretty proud of the muzzle flashes.

Brellom: It's a good example of strong teamwork allowing the page to thrive, but the decisions that allow the reader to easily move throughout the page based on Kitty's position does technically come before the colours.

Psu: It was a lot of planning and a lot of good things coming together. Like it is a pure action scene but it was also like... the height of crazy things going on for this story. The entire chapter was very ambitious but then we got these multiple teams getting into the same room. It'd be like the ending of Star Wars Episode 6 if everyone just had their big battle inside the death star throne room at the same time. That it kinda worked at all, well... I dunno what we were on at the time. I remember it being hard to make. We had some rough moments in the production. But I'm pretty happy we made it.

Gunwild: If you do say so yourself! I get it though, it's a lot of planning to tell a story with different plot threads that actually come together in a meaningful way. Let alone on one page. There are wonderful comics that really only follow a single character's interactions and point of view. They're made by smart people who don't go out of their way to make the entire process harder. So, not us.

Psu: Well... if I had to pick only one character's point of view to learn more about on this page, it'd be the big robot who forms the center of the first panel. That fella gave it all...

Gunwild: Ehh we can always write him back to functionality later if we want. Transformers does that all the time and their comics sell a lot!

Psu: But they only do that because they can sell more toys from a revamped robot design!

Gunwild: I'm not hearing an argument against us doing it.