Page Commentary No. 29

Gunwild: I mentioned this in the newspost, but man, the law REALLY hates pirates. Even in normal life. Did you know there are pretty much no laws stopping you from killing pirates?

Psu: I wonder if someone could use that excuse at a renfaire....

Psu: Some of my favorite stuff on this page is all the stuff that none of the characters are looking at. Namely Skript Kitty. I think before this page, we viewed Skript Kitty as like just a program that Cassiopeia had. But here is the first time we show he appears to have his own level of sapience.

Gunwild: I also want to say that the alt-text is from a famous thing Robert Heinlein said, where he used the line "The door dilated" in Beyond This Horizon. It's sort of like magical realism, except sci-fi realism. You throw out these unusual details in a matter-of-fact way and you can include technology very strange to us in a way that seems like nothing out of the ordinary.

Gunwild: So like, similarly, nobody calls out that the Vanaa use pneumatic tubes or whatever, it's just taken for granted, which hopefully helps the audience to swallow it without having to stop to explain things.

Psu: Like Talps being somewhere in between a Vanaa shape and a human shape.

Gunwild: Well I admit, that one threw me when I first saw it 'cause it wasn't my idea. I was like "Wasn't she, ah, sexier a minute ago?"

Psu: Sneaking things by you is how I exert my independence, dad.

Psu: Anyway, I'm not sure how often we'd do a page where character's are just running from one room to the other. When we were doing two pages a week, we definitely felt like we could get away with a regular comic book style pacing with longer action beats in between story revelations. But even here, I think, we ourselves were feeling the storyline would eventually go overlong. Looking at the date this was posted, it was December 9th in 2014. It'll be quite a while before we put this one to bed.

Gunwild: Well, I like it a lot, even if I do think we've changed the pacing of the comic since then out of necessity, and also learned more about pacing in general.

Gunwild: You know how amateur writers indulge in a lot of purple prose and unhelpful ambiguity?

Psu: I like this page too.

Psu: There's a lot of purple and red in it.

Gunwild: Red alert lighting on a starship to add to the mood really is an excellent storytelling tool. Thanks again, Star Trek.

Psu: The whole sequence with the emergency red lights on every screen is really something else and the painting style can make some of the stuff hard to see. But I think the chaos helps get the whole feel across. Even the semi holographic text that Skript Kitty is shooting out adds to the shakey feel of it without having to resort to too much tilting cameras or weird panel borders.

Gunwild: Plus I can buy that he'd switch them to auxiliary power, which would turn the lights down. As opposed to how whenever they had trouble on Voyager they'd always turn the lights down themselves, and make everything harder to see, for some reason.

Psu: I was thinking about movie theater lights.

Gunwild: You figure they do that in the Federation so people can see their panels and the viewscreen better?

Psu: Federaton panels are a health hazard! But yeah there's something to be said for mechanical switches and levers. It's not something I show here but when every device is a digital screen you risk extreme danger when you have electric cats that can muck with your flight sticks.

Gunwild: Well, as we see later with the hand sticks on the prototype ship, Vanaa do believe in backup manual controls. Or, well, they don't have hands, so they're not exactly manual.

Gunwild: Arm-gloobual.

Psu: Handy that.