Commentary Page 38 - 39

Page 038 - Nix

“Nix” is a pretty awkward thing to call someone, isn’t it? Like, even as an insult. Would you ever even call someone that? It’s surprising in hindsight that I ever got away with it, but I guess the Bastard is such a weird freak that I can put anything in his mouth (phrasing!!!!) and the audience will accept it. Some readers were even uncertain if it was meant to be an insult or her name! I didn’t really intend for that the first time he said it, but the second time I leaned into it. You’ll note that both times he says it here it’s in all caps– that makes it harder to tell if it’s a proper noun or not. It fits the vibe of the Bastard and Hellfuck where you’re not really sure how much of what he says is a metaphor.

Peri complains:

Ugh. I remember how many times we went back and forth on the phrasing of that part trying to make it work. Editor woes! I’m pleased with what we landed on though.

The name “Nix” predates pretty much everything else about Hellfuck besides the game’s name. It sounds suitably edgy while still having a cuteness to it! And spelling it with an I instead of with a Y, as in Nyx the greek goddess, gave it a bluntness I liked. I think it was first given to a half-formed demongirl OC that was floating around my head before it was fully transferred to the Foreach character.

Even Nix herself was not an angel at first, although what exactly she’d be was vague before that was settled. A horned little cyclops thing, at some point. As mentioned in an earlier commentary Rhys came up with the angel imagery, and then eventually I happened upon the idea that it would be cool if angels just literally didn’t have names, but that left the name “Nix” in limbo. Where would that one come from?

Rhys pointed out that Nix was a noun already – like I was aware of the verb form, as in “nix that”, but not of the noun “Nix” as in nothing. In a happy coincidence the name I’d cobbled together independently happened to line up with the kind of shit the Bastard was already saying, so we just made it an insult that he invented and Nix adopts as a name out of apathy. 

It’s kinda an awkward fit when we put it like that, isn’t it? It’s like that thing in the Han Solo movie where they explain that he’s called “Solo” because he “has no people”. Like, really? That’s what you’re going with? But the order we introduce the information matters. Furry musician Patricia Taxxon once remarked that if you wanna have an awkward rhyme in a song, you put the awkward-sounding word first, because then when the rhyme comes in it sounds like you're resolving the tension you set up already instead of straining to make something fit. So, if you wanna rhyme “Rifle” with “Overjissel”... have “Overjissel” come first, and “Rifle” second. 

It’s the same concept here. If we present the weird awkward nickname first, it doesn’t feel like a contrivance because the audience is unaware what it’s meant to be contriving for. They just assume there’s some deeper intent there. And thus, we get away with it.

Peri inputs:

Honestly, I really like how it came together, particularly the fact that Nix specifically allows herself to be named by her enemy. As Lum says, the sheer apathy of it (which we really see in action when she adopts it for the anime girls in Chapter 3) demonstrates just how little the Bastard manages to get to her, despite all his efforts. It’s such an interesting dynamic. You have this Bastard, who is genuinely a scary guy to just about everyone else in the cast, who is absolutely desperate for validation of his world view. And then there is Nix who by her own disinterest becomes the only person in his world who can provide that validation in a meaningful way (at least until the crossover events bring Jiro into his world!) And Nix can afford to be utterly blasé about the Bastard’s attempted torments of her because of their mutual immortality, turning the cycle of his actions into an unusual exercise in the monotony of evil.

That was a bit of a tangent, I suppose. I just like this stuff. :)

I normally avoid onomatopoeia in Foreach. We’ve discussed this earlier, on the commentary for page 31. So rest assured I had a damn good reason to break that rule here.

I’ll let you consider the problem yourself: I want Nix to step on a pressure plate here. I want the action to be conveyed in a single panel, and I want it to be totally unambiguous that she is both A) stepping on a pressure plate, and B) she’s doing it on purpose. 

Her intent, here, is at least conveyed by her big steppy pose here. She’s clearly reaching her foot as far out as possible, so she can give herself as much leeway as she needs to dive out of the way. The position of the Bastard’s shadow indicates he’s right above her, so we can presume his position was part of her plan.

But what about that first panel? What does stepping on a pressure plate look like? One way to convey that is to visibly show it moving downward, but… I can’t easily convey subtle movements in a comic like this. And the pressure plate is meant to be disguised as a paving stone; it’s part of a trap– if I put a big footprint sign on it or something that would muddy the idea that Nix is deploying a trap meant for her against her enemy.

There’s only one way out of this little conundrum, folks, and that’s a big CLICK. Mechanisms and buttons go CLICK when you press them, this is known by all. So if Nix steps on an otherwise innocuous tile and it goes CLICK, we know that’s because it was a trigger mechanism. With this being one of the only onomatopoeia in the comic, I wanted to visually justify it as something that could potentially be a UI element in Hellfuck. With this in mind I thought back to moments in games I could think of where sound effects were written out like this.. There’s a moment in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door where you step on Zess T’s contact lens and a little speech bubble with “crnch” pops out, that was one. Another was in some of the Kirby games, when you eat a hotdog and regurgitate it into your co-op buddy’s mouth so you can share the health benefits (this is an honest to god kirby mechanic) a little speech bubble pops out that says “Chu!” or “Smooch!”. The throughline there I noticed was the speech bubble, so in this instance I included one as well. For good measure I also gave the CLICK text a quirky lilt. I thought of this as one of the ways that Hellfuck taunted you, showing you a cute little sound effect right before you die violently.

Peri interposes:

One other detail I’ll add in here about visual clarity actually pertains to the panel just before the big steppy panel. If you look at it, the tile button is clearly visible right next to Nix in it. That actually wasn’t there in the first draft! We added it in to make the CLICK moment more of a “pay off”, even if the span of time between setup and pay off is pretty short. I think it also helps ground the geography of the scene!

Other remaining questions are easily resolved because it’s Hellfuck, of course. so the question of “why is there a button in the middle of this room that makes a chandelier fall on you” answers itself. “How did Nix know about the button” is easily answered by considering she’s been in this world long enough to know that if you see a chandelier in one of these rooms then of course there’s gonna be a mechanism right below it that makes it drop. That’s just how this shit works.

There is one incongruity here, which is that usually in these games, chandelier dropping mechanisms aren’t tied to a button. It’d be more like there’s an invisible motion sensor underneath them that drops the chandelier on you the instant you move under it, even if you’re not on the ground at the time. Buttons are too easy to jump over, yknow? But clarity is important– if Nix lured the Bastard under an invisible trigger volume and dropped a chandelier on him that way, it wouldn’t really communicate that she did it on purpose. You’d just think that a random chandelier showed up and saved Nix’s bacon in a twist of fate. No dice. It was important to me that Nix demonstrate agency in this scene and defeat the Bastard with her own quick wits, both for the sake of her character and to make sure the resolution felt satisfying.

Anyway here’s the first draft of the last panel:

Sometimes I do a sketch and it’s like, yeah. That’s not very good. Ended up pretty much totally redrawing it with a more extreme sense of perspective:

Peri praises:

You can really see the squash and stretch at work here! In case you're unfamiliar, squash and stretch is a principle from animation where you (you guessed it!) squash or stretch your characters/environment off model in order to emphasize motion and impact. Here, everything bows around the impact caused by the chandelier. The line of the floor curves upwards, the chain holding the chandelier diminishes impossibly fast into the distance, the characters’ bodies curve away from the site of the collision. It makes the whole composition so much more dynamic!

Lum also mentioned to me that the redraw of the panel took inspiration from this panel back in chapter 1. I love that fact, especially because the callback is not a reversal, it’s a progression of the cycle! Nix doesn’t get to slam down the Bastard in retaliation, instead the Bastard is slammed down by an even bigger antagonistic force–the environment itself. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the cycle of suffering that is so integral to what makes Hellfuck tick. There’s always a bigger fish perpetrator of suffering.

Page 039 - Never the End

When you reveal that you have an antagonist who is fundamentally immortal, you’d do well to figure out what he is weak to, because otherwise he’s just gonna run riot all over the story with zero recourse. In this case the answer came naturally enough that the Bastard is weak to being restrained. It makes sense, right? Noodly little arms like that, it’s not hard to imagine that this jerkoff can’t lift a chandelier off himself.

And it’s thematically potent, too, that in this scene we see him lain low. He drops from a major threat to just another pitiable wretch, and the shift in his dialogue matches that. He’s forced to talk to Nix in a context where he can’t push her around, and in this instance you get to sense the desperation leaking through. Not that his tone changes much, but I did hope that despite him saying the same old shit, it would feel a little sadder this time.

Peri ponders:

I think this is our first deployment of slanty text in the comic! That was a Lum idea, if I recall correctly, because I remember opening the page up for the first time and going “Oh! I love that!” It’s fun because it implies a physicality to the dialogue (i.e. the bastard is speaking in a weak and shaky voice) in a way that is trivial for voice-acted creative media (like film or podcasts) and fully-prose media, but drawn formats have to get clever about doing. Traditional comics often do with creative lettering and graphical tricks, and this is one way we found to evoke it in Foreach’s particular format limitations. Honestly, it’s fascinating that the trick works at all. Why should the angle of a line of text convey anything about the speaker’s physical state? I think it really says something about the human brain’s enormous capacity to interpret emotion and language in different forms.

I wanted the light from the door to feel blindingly bright in this scene, and of course that presented an issue, because Foreach already uses a lot of pure #FFFFFF white in its palette. How are you meant to communicate brightness when you’ve already indicated the absolutely brightest colour as merely neutral? The classic trick here is to let the brightness bleed into the lineart, which goes from pure black to brown wherever it’s in direct light. And then the shadowed parts of the image stay black. It’s like a blown out photo, where the bloom from the light leaks past the edges of the lines.

Nix getting detained by the mass of hands mere metres from the exit was one of those images that I had in mind from very early on. It’s a good culmination of the vibes and the aesthetics, that there is a way out, and it’s not even locked, but every time you try to make it there some bullshit hands appear out of nowhere and drag you all the way back. The hands were always an essential part. Being grabbed is a recurring image with Nix. She’s so small and grabbable! But she really doesn’t want to be. Every time someone grabs her is a reminder of the things about herself she doesn’t want.

I wanted the above panel to feel almost violatory. No regard for her personal space or her dignity or her comfort. There’s fully five hands here and some of them are even having trouble finding enough surface area that hasn’t already been grabbed. It’s overkill, it has to be. It wouldn’t be enough to just grab her by the scruff of the neck. This world needs to remind her of her place. It’s not even sadism, at this point, it’s the apathetic cruelty of someone kicking you down without even bothering to muster up an insult. We’ll learn more about the hands and their motivations later, and they’ll be revealed to be a little more complex than that, but here, in this moment, those individual motivations are irrelevant. Not like they’d make a difference to Nix. These hands are acting as a cog in the vast machinery of Hellfuck, causing suffering for the sake of suffering.

Peri retrospects:

Ah, the hands! Did you know, they were almost magenta?

The choice was between magenta and the royal blue. We ended up settling on the latter mostly for ~vibes~ and also because it has better contrast with both Nix and the environment of this room. Which honestly turned out to be such a lucky decision because it wasn’t until well after this that we iterated on the design for the body of the hand angel and came up with the shoulder-eyes-crying-arm-tears idea. That would have been so much harder to make work if we had gone with the magenta!

Nix’s design is usually pretty restrained and on-model, in contrast to the Bastard who distorts and twists with rage and has a million teeth and a million lines on him. She’s a few clean shapes, easy to read and well proportioned. But I liked the idea that when her emotions run high she gets less and less on-model and her entire art style shifts into something more expressionistic. She switches from a 3 dimensional shape into a rough sketch. 

And so we return to the start again. A little darker than last time to add to the gloominess. I wanted the blood to feel like it’d dried since last time, so it’s duller and… well, I tried to give it that  flaky crispy look that dried blood can have, but I ended up giving up on getting that to look right and just scraping an eraser tool over it a few times. I couldn’t mess with it too much, cause that blood is the main thing that makes this recognisable as “the first room”. Ah well!

Peri postscripts:

Let’s see, what else about this page… Oh, you know that quote where Thomas Jefferson was like, “I would have written you a shorter letter but I hadn’t the time”? Getting at the idea that sometimes a shorter, more concise piece of writing takes a lot more time and effort than a long one. This page kiiiiiinda had that effect going on. The Bastard’s speech here isn’t very many words total, but whoof it took a lot of iterations to get all those words in exactly the right place! Every line has a lot of impact, so we needed to juggle both the exact wording of each line (keeping in mind the cadence, because we wanted some lines to echo each other but we didn’t want it to feel repetitive) and also the spacing. Early drafts of this page had thicker blocks of text without all the images breaking them up and it just… didn’t feel right. We needed the one-two-one-two pattern of text and image, which creates a sense of the Bastard transcending  almost to narrator status for a brief time as we watch the culmination of Nix’s struggles. Especially the final line: “There is NO - WAY - OUT” took a surprising amount of finagling to get the right interspersing of words and text!