Page Commentary No. 118

Gunwild: Eww kissing, this comic has turned into girl stuff for girls. I mean I wrote it that way but still eeew.

Psu: Weirdly enough, isn't this our first actual kiss in the comic? I mean... weren't we supposed to be a sexy fun times adventure series?

Gunwild: You kept wanting to draw technology instead of butts!

Psu: Sometimes they're both. I like this page quite a lot really. It also has the crocogator on a bike. We don't actually introduce Penny at all, she looks quite like another cyborg on this page which is fine. But basically Minx has always had her own separate storyline that Gunwild and I worked on for a long time. It was fun to use those details, to give the image that Minx had her own life outside of the Cassiopeia comics. That kind of stuff always makes the world much bigger and more interesting.

Gunwild: Yeah, I mean at least you have some idea that Motor Minx is a person with stuff going on so that it's not super weird later when she gets more involved in some way... also Cassiopeia is about as good at waxing poetic as I am (not very) but at least Zeke knows not to stay shy about these things when prompted.

Psu: It's such a corny page. I think we didn't realize how much the kids would change the comic and we started understanding each of them starting from here. I like to think we gave them a sense of having their own lives, ontop of being a group of characters. I might have mentioned this lesson I got from a Pixar director's commentary for Finding Nemo. About how you build secondary casts inside your main cast. They sort of all work as one part of the story to your main characters, but each of them can offer their own varied eccentricities. The example they were talking about in Finding Nemo were the various fish in the Dentist's Fish Tank. But the directors made the comparison to the other mental patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. You can get a lot of color by simplifying each of the characters in that group. But with how long our comic ends up going, the kiddos have more time to develop than either of those movie characters.

Gunwild: Yeah... like uh... they'll all have different haircuts! That's character development!

Psu: Ashley actually gets a different one pretty soon! Anyway, I feel like... this page is the most traditional webcomic-y our comic gets. I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just the most we deal directly with Zeke and Cassiopeia's relationship up to that point. Apart from the one New Years strip. Which we thought was a good way to send off readers at that time.

Gunwild: "Send off?"

Psu: Yeah, ya know. Happy new year. Well wishes. Here's to a better future?

Gunwild: Oh okay. "Send off" sort of means "send away" so... well, never mind. Happy new year!