Page Commentary No. 195

Psu: Butt.

Gunwild: I actually feel bad about including the narration up front here, it's a big pain in the butt when a character has an internal monologue that just disappears, or dips in and out at odd moments. It would work fine without the paraphrased Schopenhauer nonsense.

Psu: I think we definitely went easy on the narration in Cassiopeia Quinn overall. I know you had more thoughts about it than I've had. But I'm right now remembering this comment in the Terminator 2 Director's Commentary. James Cameron talked about starting the movie with Sarah Connor's narration, but for a LOT of the movie it's completely absent until around the middle during a slow point that she starts speaking again. He knew that it would be jarring to have the voice over return after not being a thing for a while, so it was a slower sequence and Sarah was in frame. You could tell it was something she was thinking about right then and there. So.... I think that's a long way of saying that narration has it's place. But you and I wanted to use it pretty sparingly.

Gunwild: Naturally someone asked how much a shmoon weighs. I said "More than a glopf, but less than a pludge."

Psu: Well... whatever it actually is, Maddy looks great. I think this is one of my favorite pages. I liked using these muted colors for the inside of the locker room. The first panel has all these big lockers taking up the frame, echoing her heavy thoughts. We get a tiny bit of visual story telling what with the shields turning on in panel 2. And then, the bottom of the page has this DRAMATIC pink and purple color, with giant lines pointing right at Maddy. And then the title looks super cool. I paid for that font and I think this is the only place I've used it. And it's worth it.

Gunwild: Well, who doesn't like a good "quiet in locker room and then shift to noisy stadium with lights" transition?

Psu: We have totally seen a lot of cool movies.

Gunwild: I think I complain a lot about how uninteresting I found Zuko's arc in Avatar the Last Airbender - something people love about that show. Part of it was that I didn't really understand what his concept of honor was or why it was so important to him. It's a bit different compared to like, Worf's from Star Trek The Next Generation, where he's always happy to list what he thinks is cowardly or unworthy beforehand, so you know what his choices will mean to him. I guess I'm trying to outline Maddy's thoughts on it here, and they'll be hit on in a few pages with a flashback of her parents.

Psu: Do you remember the earliest we talked about having a chapter like this? Because I knew we wanted a lot of Maddy's arc to be about realizing what "honor" is. I know you've also wanted to do a sword fight or a duel too. I remember the earliest iteration of our dueling chapter actually didn't involve Maddy at all but it was Cassiopeia telling a couple dudes "don't be idiots."

Gunwild: Yeah, I feel like I may have given it away in a commentary already, but I was inspired by this episode of The Rifleman (an old show I like) where two guys want Chuck Connors' character to arrange a quickdraw duel between them or something because they both respect him, which is an awful position for him to be in. My idea was it would be two old friends of Cassiopeia who wanted to settle a land dispute over the microplanet they'd retired to with a duel to the death, with Cassiopeia setting the rules so it would be fair. Cassiopeia, of course, would give them nasty-looking pistols at dawn. Which turn out to be bubble guns.

Psu: Heh. I didn't remember the bubble guns.

Gunwild: Yeah, that's her kinda thing. Anyway, the whole thing would be worked out by those two realizing that getting married instead would give them shared rights to each others' sides of the planet AND a tax break. But the other thing was that this would be paralleled with flashbacks of Maddy getting her job because her captain was killed in a pointless duel. Which made you go "Why don't we just tell that story instead?" So it is an idea we actually kept.

Psu: The Duel between two other characters was kinda a holdover from when we thought we could just have infinite stories. And we can but as it turns out, I'm slow and my hand hurts just looking at the arena on this page 

Gunwild: Next time just draw it about half-empty and claim it's got a lot of people in it! BA-ZOW, TOPICAL HUMOR!