Page Commentary No. 228

Psu: I can't remember if one of us had to fight for this page, but either way I'm currently glad it's here.

Gunwild: I remember I had this lore as my thing waaay back... also, you ever wish you'd gotten really good at drawing fantasy maps? I wish that often.

Psu: I was good at drawing fantasy maps! Possibly I wasn't the best at drawing maps, I definitely cut my teeth setting up dungeons and dragons worlds. I hit most of the cliches about having a mountain range that's the spine or some sorta elven woods here and there. But I did avoid things like, "here's where fake asia is and you can get katanas."

Gunwild: H-hey, there are worse things to try out when you're first attempting world-building type nonsense...

Psu: Oh absolutely. But if you're the type of kid that just put down a piece of paper and decided to start making a fantasy map, then you're gonna put down everything you're into at that moment. It's a bunch of fun and forces your imagination to go everywhere. This page is a bunch of fun. I think we've went over this before, but Cassiopeia is totally goofy but is at her core a mathemagician. It's actually how most of her exploits end successfully. She doesn't do lucky shots.

Gunwild: It's a bit of an easy "Yeah she's just super good at that brain-thing!" excuse, and I'd have been foolish to ground it in science I don't know. So like everything else in the comic it's just sci-fi funsies.

Psu: It's okay to give our exceptional main character an exceptional ability.

Gunwild: Yeah but I like to at least give a "why" and also feature some silliness in our silly comic.

Psu: And I think you wanted to work in a Gundam thing, which might be our first Gundam thing in the entire comic.

Gunwild: Well it's not even a direct Gundam thing, it's more the explanation I concocted for myself while watching that classic 1979 science fiction war anime to explain to myself what was going on. Between the robots fighting with laser swords, that is. But that "new type" phrasing I have Zeke use is surely inspired by the "Newtypes" from that universe. However I did look up enough science terms to learn "planetar" while I was writing this one, and that's fun!

Psu: Oh yeah, I know we talked about how you find a missing planet by observing the stuff around the planet. Like you can hide the planet from maps but it's a little harder to hide it's gravity. Especially if somehow someone wrote all that info on paper. Anyway, I can sense this commentary winding down. I just wanted to point out some fun stuff in this page. I like the way Penny says "secretly a cyborg" because if we haven't said it yet, she is one herself.

Gunwild: Yep, I thought that was about enough to slip it in while still allowing it to be not a big deal in this setting, among these people.

Psu: Things that might've been too subtle are the visuals on this page. This was kinda a hard page to figure out! It's another Cassiopeia Quinn style shift from a totally natural environment to something completely spacey. So I tried to do things like... there's a planet they're passing by out the window so that gives the reader a sort of baseline where to look. There's some of the glass frame for their ship's window. The holographic lines make it look like Cassiopeia is swimming through the air.

Gunwild: It's true and it's very good. Also, that belt joke is me clearly not allowing another page to go by without a severed head joke.

Psu: We needed to get them out of our system.

Gunwild: They'd been in our heads.