Page Commentary No. 22

Psu: For all the times I do it, I sure am bad at drawing hands placed on hips.

Gunwild: I don't think I'd noticed the Ditto face in Panel 5. That's a good one.

Psu: Well what I remember liking most about this page is that clearly Maddie already decided what she was going to do with the thing as early as the last page. To do that I think her expression needed to be cool and unchanging while everyone else around her was wondering what was gonna be up. But Maddie was just letting the kid speak her mind. I think this cemented for a lot of readers who she was.

Gunwild: Mhm, as I recall I was thinking about making it a bit more ambiguous if she actually wanted to help them or not. But instead we started the tradition of her showing she's quite altruistic while still following rules.

Gunwild: That's a tough line to walk, people liking that about her is a good thing.

Psu: Rules are pretty important but she has like this order of priorities thing. I think she always knew why she joined the Navy and that was helping people as much as she can.

Psu: On that note, I think this is the first appearance of one of the admirals.

Gunwild: Just to get into this, the "Admirals" trio totally includes Captain Rosalba, who is actually equal in rank to Maddy, but has a different role in the Navy.

Gunwild: This is a thing from real life, where nominally Captains are equal in rank, but one who's in charge of a ship has more status and prestige than one who, say, works in administration, even though both jobs are important. So later on when you see Rosalba kind of resenting Maddy in a couple strips, that hopefully comes across a bit.

Gunwild: I would also like to call attention to something done in a couple of panels here, especially the final one:

Gunwild: Comics, unlike film, don't have to alternate between depths of field.

Gunwild: So in the same shot, we can see clearly the people's feelings, Cupcake's feelings, and Maddy hiding her feelings, even though all three are standing at different ranges doing different things.

Gunwild: It would take three shots, or at least three different focus arrangements, to show those things with a camera.

Gunwild: But we can do it all in one drawing.

Psu: It's actually easier to do that than adding fake blur... But yeah, arranging characters into a panel is much different than composing a camera shot. I try to organize characters by their speaking order. Webcomics tend to do this more often than books, you'll see characters lined up in longer panels. It's important in a talky scene to provide just enough context for who's speaking, how they're saying it, and what order they're all in. And I think the framing here does that well enough.

Gunwild: If done well, it adds a lot of density and subtlety!

Psu: I do really like the overcast sky on this page. But gosh... it's really a good thing we went to color. Grey pages were always holding this comic back.

 Gunwild: Psu spells it "grey" and I spell it "gray." But we make things work, because we're dedicated people.

Psu: This probably would've killed people to know this but in an old story of mine I was writing as a kid, I had a character named Gray but spelled the word grey frequently throughout. I thought it was clever...

Gunwild: It might be!