The Answers Post (#10)

Welcome to the last set of Answers for 2024! These questions are submitted by Patreon supporters but the answers are free for anyone to read. Let’s get to it:

1.) Neeul: When drawing all the little nicks and bruises for so many characters' battle damage in a fight sequence, you seem to keep them amazingly consistent from page to page. Do you just pop open the previous page to check where each cut was, or do you mark up a little temporary diagram for each character per fight scene?

The first option—I open the previous comics and double check them. Usually that’s one of the last steps before finishing the art, along with things like smoke effects. Then my wife meticulously checks them and tells me how many I forgot. (And then we still miss some.)

2.) Sasa Morishima: Hi! Just a quick question: will we ever find out how V and Haley met and became friends? Apologies if this has already been answered!

I don’t currently have any particular set of events in mind for what would have happened, so I can’t say there’s any plan to explore it. But it’s entirely possible I could come up with a fun idea at some later point so I can’t rule it out, either. It’s a mystery, wooooooooo!

3.) John Mechalas: Minrah is the first person to form a truly positive and healthy relationship with Belkar. What do you want your readers to take away from their friendship?

I think strip #1194 basically sums it up. Putting aside the fact that Belkar’s situation involves larger issues of justice and punishment and looking at it solely from the angle of someone trying to fix themselves, my point was that it’s easy to get stuck in patterns of behavior that aren’t healthy simply because everyone you know subtly (or sometimes overtly) reinforces them. They may tell you they want you to change, but then continue to assume you’re going to act the same way despite whatever steps you’ve taken. This can be discouraging and lead you to just give up on changing, because it’s hard and if no one is going to acknowledge it anyway, then what’s the point? I wanted to sort of push back on that and say that there’s always a point to self-improvement, even if only with regard to people who meet you after you’ve self-improved.

4.) Tomer Mlynarsky: If it's okay to ask about merch, there are quite a few people asking about OOTS plushies. Since there is a demand, would that be something you would consider?

A better man than I would look at this question posed back in September and not use it to plug the Elan plushies currently on sale (order deadline now extended until January 2). Alas.

5.) Joseph Meehan: Are you still working on new AMFES sets or adding VTT tokens to older sets?

And that theoretically better man certainly wouldn’t do it twice in a row, using a question he already addressed two installments ago to mention that digital tokens have now been added to the Spring 1 set of A Monster for Every Season as a free update for anyone who purchased that set, and the remaining seasons will be rolling out over the next few months. Tragic, really.

6.) Tomer Mlynarsky: Curious at how far in advance did you have the idea of Sunny? Specifically that Serini's kid would be a creature of that species (who I may or may not be allowed to mention due to legal reason) and that he is the one that appeared all the way back in book 1?

There are two separate concepts here and they were developed at different times. The idea that the [redacted] who appeared in that one strip from Dungeon Crawlin’ Fools would turn out to be part of the group that was defending the final Gate alongside Serini came to me very early, basically as soon as I knew that Serini would be alive and assisting them. I thought it would be a funny callback, as well as explaining how a powerful monster like that showed up just for a gag panel and then wasn’t relevant afterward. So probably somewhere around the Crayons of Time, since that’s when I hammered out the Scribblers and what role they would play.

But Sunny’s name, personality, and specific relationship to Serini were all developed during the planning for the current arc. In fact, you can see that in the last strip of Utterly Dwarfed where the invisible Sunny refers to Serini solely as “Boss.” This wasn’t just a clever way of disguising their relationship—that relationship didn’t exist until I did my outlining for this book!

7.) Leo Once3333: Why was Sunny in Dorukan's dungeon anyways? (Hoping this isn't a spoiler.)

Dorukan’s dungeon was a convenient repository of monsters, particularly weird ones attracted by that amulet that Nale was after. Serini was trying to recruit some of them to come join her dungeon instead, because it was easier than tracking down all those different types individually. She was doing it stealthily because per their agreement, she wasn’t supposed to be even interacting with Dorukan’s facility (much less poaching talent from it).

8.) Zhon Lord: Bitterleaf, Shaleshoe, Toormuck, Vaarsuvius, Kubota, you have a great many unusual names in your world and story. How do you come up with these names for your characters?

Man, I wish I knew so it would be easier to do in the future. The only thing I can say is that I try really hard not to duplicate consonant sounds too closely, and even that was a lesson hard-earned by the Durkon/Dorukan situation.

9.) Paulo Villi: so, about Xykon... he's really just an unfortunately powerful psycho who's had unfortunately effective help becoming even more unfortunately powerful, isn't he? i think you mentioned how other characters evolved to gain more depth over time, but it seems he's the one who kept emotionally as shallow as a teacup... was that always the plan? is his depth somewhere else than his emotions? why is he so eerily effective threatening almost anyone?!

I would argue Xykon has evolved to gain more depth over time, at least in the sense of real world time. It’s just that the development mostly took place in his prequel story, Start of Darkness. The Xykon we see in the main strip is already dead. He doesn’t really evolve or grow anymore, and as a lich, he made the conscious decision to throw away that potential in exchange for magic power. He now exists primarily as an obstacle to catalyze the evolution of other characters. That’s the thing about being around for a long time, you need to choose to keep growing or else you just stay stuck as an impediment to future progress that needs to be defeated.

10.) Chase Curtin: Does it feel freeing or limiting to be approaching the end of the story, in terms of narrative planning

Both, sort of? On one hand, I have a really good outline of story beats that I need to hit in a specific order that I can follow, all the way up to the end of the story. But on the other hand, it’s getting tougher to fit any individual strip into that existing framework if it doesn’t include a plot reveal of some sort. Jokes are definitely harder to write than they used to be, though it’s not clear whether that’s because I’ve already mined my life experiences for 1300+ punchlines, or because I don’t feel like I can pull out a gag that might have unintended consequences for the characters. I can’t fall back on Roy calling Elan an idiot when their relationship has progressed beyond that!

11.) Thed Preston: Can you give us graphic design weenies a bit more detail as to how the artwork is created?  Which body parts live in separate layers, what swatches you use for components, whether you save as AI files or PDF, whether each strip is a single file or whether you have libraries of body components, whether you use different components for zoomed-in scenes, how you crop art to panel borders, etc.

I’ll do my best to give more of an idea. Each comic is usually a separate file, though I sometimes use a template with four separate artboards to work on four pages at once—mostly when I’m doing a whole story entirely from scratch, like one of the prequels. My template has layers that I’ve pre-named so I can find where to put elements, with the topmost layers being the things that float above the black border lines and the bottommost being the elements that are furthest in the background. Here's what my layer window looks like, for those who understand it:

You can see that the layers are not divided by panel, so all the elements at the same “distance” from the reader are sitting on the same layer. That means each character generally has all of their body parts on the same layer based on their position in the scene, though complex interactions sometimes require that someone’s hand or weapon jump up to the layer above or down to the one below it. Cropping is usually just a simple clipping mask for each panel. Extremely complex art, like the scene-setting splash of Tinkertown, requires me to add a bunch more layers to keep everything sorted.

Files are .ai files rather than PDFs, for no particular reason other than that PDFs were a lot buggier and required separate “distilling” back in 2003 and I’ve never looked into whether I should bother changing that aspect of my workflow. (And before someone assumes that .ai means I’m using some kind of artificial intelligence, it stands for Adobe Illustrator. That’s the file suffix for the program I use.) All of that leads me to your next question…

12.) Thed Preston: Do you always update Illustrator to the most recent version, or is there an older revision that you have decided to stay at?

I clutch on to existing versions of every piece of software I use until I’m forced by outside circumstances to update. Every time I do update, it ends up changing some little idiosyncratic aspect of how I work that I have trouble adjusting to. I’m still upset that Illustrator CC got rid of the precise numeric designation for line fidelity on the Pencil tool, since none of the preset options they replaced it with exactly matches the setting I used for the first thousand or so strips.

13.) Pablo Bianucci: This one is more on the personal side, so I will not get offended if you do not answer, but I am curious. It has been more than 10 years since you hurt your thumb. Would you say you are completely recovered and that the injury is in the past, or do you think it still affecting your work (or anything in the middle)?

It still affects me, every day. It’s “healed” in the sense that there is not more recovery forthcoming, but it is permanently impaired and that’s just how it is. I work around it, mostly by not doing too much art in one sitting. There’s been some suggestion that a second surgery could help, but that would require months of recovery before getting back to drawing and I don’t know that I can handle that emotionally, much less afford that long of a break financially.

14.) Jude Cyrus: As an Architecture and Engineering enthusiast, what are some of Roy's favorite Architectural Styles?

I wrote a whole answer for this before realizing that I was having Roy parrot my own likes (Biomorphism! Blobitecture!), and that I actually wasn’t conversant enough in architectural design to be able to articulate a separate set of preferences that correlated more closely with his character. He’s probably not a fan of either Rococo or Brutalism, though. Seems like he’d like something in the middle that is functional without being an eyesore.

15.) Anonymous (via Private Message): I’m leaving Twitter. Do you have another way to follow you?

Well, here’s the thing. I just created an account on Bluesky, but it turns out there was already someone on there impersonating me. Since the site doesn’t have any way to formally verify identity, someone has just set up shop copying every one of my Twitter tweets and interspersing other things I never said between them. I’m not going to link to that, but I will link to my actual new Bluesky account: rich-burlew.giantitp.com. Any other account claiming to be me is fake and should be disregarded.

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And that’s it for this time. Thanks as always to my Patreon supporters for their great questions, and keep in mind that if your question didn’t get answered this round, I might circle back to it in a future installment. Have a great New Year, everyone.