Page Commentary No. 137

Gunwild: I didn't write the fourth wall being broken in the last panel, readers! Psu did it! It's not my fault!

Psu: /:3

Gunwild: I just wrote her smiling slyly 'cuz she's allowed to make a bit of a mess. But Psu made her look at you!

Psu: I'll take the blame. Anyway, this page was a fairly complicated one. But I think it shows a couple good decisions early on that are paying off, notably is the color temperatures used in the various scenes. While Vern and Kamsi at the top aren't completely segregated from the rest of the action, I think the backgrounds and colors help you see that we're in three different areas. Cassiopeia's red bike continues to be an easy thing to spot, even for complicated sequences. And speaking of complicated, figuring out how Kamsi climbed onto Vern's shoulders was one of the more difficult bits of posing in this entire comic.

Gunwild: I believe you said at the time that having smaller characters in some way jump on or climb on larger ones is one of the key pleasures of having them in the first place.

Psu: It was one of the key lessons I learned from Scott McCloud who was analyzing the work of Rumiko Takahashi, and that you can have variety in shapes and sizes in your characters for a lot of visual interest. I think Gunwild was always up for having Kamsi be small, though.

Gunwild: True, 'cuz great comedic duos should be really physically distinct from each other!

Psu: It's a pretty time tested tradition. Having Vern and Kasmi really did help this chapter a lot I think. Even though it was already getting pretty complicated what with a star ship crashing the scene.

Gunwild: It can be useful in a comic to feature announcers of some kind, because it's good to show instead of tell... but someone whose job it is to explain stuff can get away with fitting in a bit of telling, from time to time, and it's not weird.

Psu: I dunno, I'm on the art side of things and I often think the telling can do a LOT of heavy lifting that's just inefficient or even ineffective through the art. But I think when it comes to Kamsi and Vern, a lot of the fun is just showing Kamsi's antics.

Gunwild: I meant to just have Theira's targeting system call things the same stuff she does, but at this point "Radical Speeder" has become the canon name for the vehicle. Oh, well!