Page Commentary No. 2

Gunwild: We haven't had internal monologues for a while. We should bring them back, they let me be pretentious and stuff!

Psu: I think I've mentioned this before on my twitter but I don't really have a hard and fast rule about showing and not telling. I think telling just helps you get a lot of things done. But for the past year or so of pages we really haven't used any of these internal monologues. I think there's a script for Prince Gleb you've got lying around that I really shouldn't be talking about, involving monologue because there isn't really an efficient way to show all the things he knows without telling people about it.

Gunwild: Oh right, I did write that! Hope we get to do it soon. Also, I remember you were waiting for someone to come at you for drawing a "boobs and butt" pose in the last panel, but I don't think anyone really did. Probably because with her twisting as the ship zooms by, it looks fairly natural.

Psu: This page is quite a trip to the past. It's black and white for one, I had every intention of keeping the production side of things simple and fast. Neither of those things were true then, and they're even less true now. But you can see a couple spots where I attempted to cut corners. The "pen" work is loose and you can see lots of incomplete shapes. A lot of the swoosh effect work was left to these good looking built in manga studio textures. And then this was still using photoshop for final effects like the complicated headsup display for Cassiopeia.

Psu: Who, I have to add, sounds a bit different than her more modern self. We got a lot better idea of who she was in her off time, just by writing her in different scenarios. I think early on we had more of a vision of an extremely competent and confident character who probably eats hamburgers instead of working out. Now I think we have someone who's a surprisingly competent but slightly childish character who makes giant space burritos.

Gunwild: It's surely character progression, and not me finding it easier to write a big kid to contrast with Maddy...

Psu: Well, I'm sure we'll go over that some more later but Maddy wasn't even a character yet.

Psu: There's a lot of little technical things I want to go over as I also intended to use this experiment with Cassiopeia Quinn to try some new things artistically. Here in this page there was very clearly a way that I wanted the "camera" to get closer to Peia with every panel before being forced into a big zoom out. Getting the space ship zooming by to look like a space ship zooming by from that angle was tricky, but I relied a bit on the dialog to let us know what was going on. Panel 2, it was hard to tell the reader what the little jet booster attached to her ankle was, just sticking out like that. But some of these things I just trusted to become more clear as the comic went on.

Psu: With this first comic, we had come up with it to be sold as a single issue comic. So we had the luxury of thinking, that when someone bought the comic they would have the whole thing in their hand. And we could comfortably explain things in subsequent pages. Now we have to balance pages being able to stand on their own two feet.

Gunwild: I wish pages had a predictable number of "feet." You can see just in the first two pages how the number of panels varies, which changes how much one can stuff in in terms of both dialogue and images.

PAGE 1

(Panel 1: Page-wide view of Cassiopeia floating in space, her body limp. Naturally,
she wears a skintight style of spacesuit, with a front visor that is see-through so that it lets you look at her pretty face, for acting! She is asleep, and there may be a chip on the side of the helmet where it was impacted, knocking her out. Possibly the borders of the panels are hazy to show she's out of it at this point? On the small of her back is the magnetic harpoon that's going to come up later - which you've chosen to make look a bit like a piece of industrial equipment, but fortunately still sleek and cool, rather than all gritty and Dead Space like.)

CAPTION 1: I like to sleep.

CAPTION 2: It's like taking a little vacation from yourself.

(Panel 2: Tighter on her upper body. Cassie is waking up, touching the side of her helmet where she was hit and opening her eyes. Maybe her other hand is rubbing the belly of her spacesuit to check for tears and holes.)

CAPTION 1: There are good times and bad times for it, though.

CASSIOPEIA 1: Unngh...

 (Panel 3: Tighter on her face. Cassiopeia's
expression is now surprised, panicked. There's an exclamation mark and some
numbers lighting up the inside of her helmet as a display – possibly legible
words are presenting themselves as a HUD to her. I know you're interested in
doing that, but when it's possible or not will be up to your discretion.)

HELMET SFX: DWEET

RED CAPTION 1: OBJECT WARNING

CASSIOPEIA 1: Uh-oh.

CAPTION 1: Good times would be after a big meal, or some quality cuddling...

 (Panel 4: Biggest panel on the page; a starfighter is tearing past Cassiopeia while she reels back, covering her face with her arms and tucking her knees in. It has a wing that's nearly, uh, winging her, although there's no visible canopy so we can't see the pilot or anything. It might well be a drone.)

CASSIOPEIA 1: Yeek!

CAPTION 1: Bad time?