Page Commentary No. 115

Psu: LOOK AT THOSE DORKY RAGAMUFFINS

Gunwild: I have a bit of a story about writing this. Originally I wrote Cassiopeia in panel two there saying "Word to your viewers!" because that's the kind of thing she would say. But someone else pointed out that might appear like she is trying to appear "urban" next to a brown person? Even though I never made that connection, because to me Kamsi is far from "urban," being a tiny elf from Space Australia...

Psu: It is pretty easy to miss these connections if you're not predisposed to finding them. And that's not to say we're not sensitive about these matters. It's just that during the process of creating, you can get so caught up in what you're trying to say that you miss the things you're accidentally saying. And I think, while that sort of thing might happen to Cassiopeia a lot. We have the opportunity to exercise more control over messaging, what we just need are friends and other people who can help us catch these things we didn't notice.

Gunwild: Anyway that's a lot of kids to design for one page!

Psu: There's a LOT of design work on this page! I had to establish the race setting as being a kind of ruined city. I had to design both Kasmi and Vernon. AND I had to come up with a bunch of kids when I think at this point we had just written "Zeke surrounded by space orphans" or something in the script.

Gunwild: For most of Maddy's crew and stuff I had notes for each character's general design direction. But you decided almost everything about the kiddos' looks yourself, honestly, like that there should be "the smart one" and "the chubby one" and stuff.

Psu: Sci Pi is possibly my favorite shirt I've designed for this comic. But I didn't do all the decisions myself! This is actually Brellom's first page working on the comic and Brellom incidentally decided the colors of all the kiddos. The only thing I remember changing was altering Maks so he looked a little LESS like Steven Universe. I didn't put a LOT of thought into them, as honestly at this point we had thought of them as one off characters. And then Gunwild had to give them all names...

Gunwild: Not exactly true! Brellom colored an entire page a little bit back. But yeah I did name them. We'll talk about that on the page all about them as individuals...

Psu: Oh yeah, there was that one page with Senchel. That was a good one. I just remember thinking a lot about how Brellom colored the snack bowl this nuclear yellow. And I'm just there, working on the page, thinking this is the ugliest bowl I've ever seen. And I just had to leave it like that.