Commentary: Pages 36-37

Page 036 - Earthly Delights

So, this one was going to be called “Say Goodbye” in a kind of charming pairing with the last page but then I kinda just didn’t do that. The current title was inspired by, of all things, the alt text to a Dr McNinja page where Dr McNinja’s gunslinger boy sidekick Gordito beat up some villains, which read “the child delights in violence”. Phrase got stuck in my head. I mean okay it’s obviously also a reference to Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which felt appropriate given the chaos being introduced into this religiously themed setting. A bazooka is a pretty earthly as far as delights go.

Peri replies:

I also like “Earthly Delights” a lot as a name because there’s an implication of something a little bit sinful in it. These aren’t heavenly delights, no sir. We all know we probably shouldn’t enjoy destruction, but you gotta admit… there’s a certain, devilish joy you can only get from blowing stuff up with no repercussions.

This is one of my favourite panels for reasons I can’t quite place. Something about it… pictographically. The way the jagged yellow part of that trail extends into the foreground… that’s what it’s all about. For some reason I’m always reminded of the 2011 game Brink, which I never played, didn’t review well, and didn’t even have any art that looks like this.

In any case, this panel wasn’t in here at first!

Peri was right, as is so often the case. A better transition was needed. We flitted through a few options here, but there were a couple of restrictions I’d imposed on myself:

• I didn’t want to show Nix’s reaction until after she’d blown up a few things first. I like the idea that you kind of revel in the mayhem for her at first, and for the flow of the page I think having a single reaction after she blows a bunch of stuff up flows better than having one reaction per explosion.

• I didn’t want to show the Bastard being actively killed, because I wanted to save the big reveal of his immortality for next page. So if he gets hit with a rocket launcher, it should be in a way that doesn’t look too deadly.

The end result I came up with was a slapstick middle ground. I like the looney tunes fly-away especially for how it totally obliterates the Bastard’s heretofore unchallenged intimidation factor. The Bastard really was once the scariest motherfucker in this world. But now things are crossing over. Now he’s competing with Bertha. 

Shout out to this little fixture here. It can be tricky to combine “platformer geometry” with “intricate cathedral architecture”. Platformers tend to have some pretty haphazardly placed hazards and platformers that don’t line up super well with the beautiful symmetries of cathedrals. Of course, that dissonance can be a good thing in this case because it fits well with the kind of game, and the kind of world, that Hellfuck is.

Here I had an L-shaped bit of geometry sitting on a pillar. By itself that threatened to look a little unmoored from the aesthetic, so in order to make up for it I decided to make the pillar as swaggy as possible. Gotta love that spiral look… so elegant!

Pretty core to the DNA of Foreach is the idea of different worlds colliding and crossing over with each other. Part of that process involves figuring out how interactions between worlds can work! Hellfuck could be especially tricky because of just how ludicrously hostile it is. When you stop and think, spinny blade death courses like this don’t really provide a lot of avenues for interaction with them. You sure as hell couldn’t debate them. And even in RPGs and FPSs, environmental hazards tend to be totally invincible. Their role in games like those is to be a break from the standard combat, a new kind of challenge that tests different skills of the player.

This can create an issue where we could end up with a situation where few characters in the story can meaningfully interact with an entire one of the worlds in the setting. If Nix is the only character who can navigate this world, then that severely limits what I can do with it narratively– the entire arc in chapter three where Jiro, Sunny and Polyta get stuck down there wouldn’t be able to occur if they all would get buzzsawed to death instantly from being down there. So I needed to bake some leeway into the system.

With that in mind, I decided to go with the idea that the buzzsaws and spikes could be considered enemies instead of hazards. Who’s to say they can’t take damage, right? Nix has no methods of attacking, so she’d never be able to find that out herself. Being able to fight through the hazards of Hellfuck gives other characters the opportunity to interact with the setting without getting shredded in half, and it enabled this sequence where Nix gets to exact revenge on the world that kept her down.

Peri ponders:

Not too much else for me to add on this page… Honestly, I’m scrolling back through our chat and it’s mostly Lum posting finished panels with me and Rhys responding “Pow!” “pewpewpew!” “KABOOOOM”. 

To be fair, this is also how most of our readers responded. Rocket launchers just have that effect on people!

Page 037 - Escape Character

The door!

The Escape Door is intended as the final goal in Hellfuck. At some point it would have been foreshadowed more as Nix’s ultimate goal, but I ended up removing Nix’s little world map and she doesn’t exactly have anyone to explain her goals to, so it kinda had to stand up for itself. 

Peri prepends:

You know, I’ve always thought it was interesting that we get to the end of Hellfuck (the game) so quickly in the comic. It really distinguishes it from the other game worlds. Homebound is clearly narratively driven, with some presumed “ending” to the story of it. Love Bomb has progression mechanics that you’ll eventually top out with each girl’s Love Level, and some sort of narrative in the form of defeating Proteus.) Last Gun might not even have a proper “end state” given it’s format as an arcade shooter. (And now that I’m thinking about it, how fitting for it to be Nix’s chosen comfort game given it’s endless power fantasy in response to her endless suffering!)

We’re only in Chapter 2, and yet here it is: the actual, canonical end of the game Hellfuck… or is it? We already know that the Hands are there to prevent ever actually reaching the door. And given Hellfuck’s propensity for saying “Fuck you” to the player, even if there was some way to ninja your way past the Hands, who’s to say what was on the other side of the door before the glitches connected it to Love Bomb? Maybe it looped back to the start of the map again, or lead to a whole new challenge area.

I suppose the true answer is immaterial, but it still creates an interesting dynamic to have the “end” of the game show up so quickly. It creates an implication that on some level, we’ve already seen the scope of what the world of Hellfuck has to offer. Buzzsaws. Traps. Suffering. The detail may vary, but in broad strokes, prior to the incursions of other worlds there’s not that much more to it than that. At least not as we see it through Nix’s eyes. Does this limit the narrative potential of Hellfuck? Maybe a little bit? But that also gives us a different tool set of tropes and expectations to play with as we plot out the future of the four worlds of Foreach. If we start from an assumption of a limited setting, how do we subvert that? Hellfuck has always been the least lore-ful of the four game settings (in fact, the lack of lore itself becomes a diagetic aspect as noted by Jiro in Chapter 3), and at least so far it’s probably the game with the least going on internally, so far mostly acting as a hostile environment for characters to pass through. Some of this is by design, and some of it is a consequence of other choices made for the comic, but it’s an aspect that we often consider when brainstorming future chapters of Foreach!

The door is a light source, yet it’s also the darkest-coloured thing in the room. It’s paradoxical, it breaks the laws of nature just to draw more attention to itself. It’s a very videogamey way for an object to be, where it emits light without making any reason to do so, a glow borne entirely of the need to attract attention. Here that glow is pushed to the point where that door becomes the primary light source in the room– more than the conspicuous chandelier which, of course, exists for the sole purpose of falling on you.

Peri passes along:

Not to tattle, but sometimes Lum likes to call this “the difficult lighting room.” It looks amazing but I think this is the location that they’ve griped most about drawing in the entire comic, especially since it comes back for a fairly complicated sequence in Chapter 3!

I’m proud of how I pulled this panel off, which I think does a pretty good job communicating “explosion that specifically blew your head off”. The force of the rocket being diffused backward past his head…

Peri peeps:

Oh yeah 100% agreed, this is a great panel. And I think it’s actually doing even more than Lum says here. Consider the actions this panel conveys:

• Nix is surprised by the Bastard and swings around suddenly

• Nix fires the rocket launch

• The blast hits the Bastard and injures him

These actions do not actually happen simultaneously, but using artistic tricks like the motion lines on the rocket launcher and explosion effects, Lum manages to convey them all in a single image. This could very easily have been multiple panels, showing each event after the other. In a traditional comic page that may have been the better way to show it, but in Foreach, that wouldn’t have been very efficient!

Because of our format restrictions (i.e. only 8-10 panels per page, and no narration), it can be quite a trick to convey multi-step action sequences. The more a panel can show actual sequences of events, rather than just a singular moment in time, the more narrative mileage we can get out of the art and the more story we can cover on a single page.

The Bastard responds to the same injury differently at different points in the comic. Last page he got blown up with a rocket launcher and he went flying, this page he gets hit and he stays still but loses his head. Any time this happens I make sure I have some kind of logic for it. On the last page, the Bastard was not expecting to cop a hit like that, and the rocket hit him in his meaty torso. This time, he was able to brace himself for impact, and the rocket hit him on his flimsy little head. There’s a lot of situations in the comic where I have an internal logic in mind for how they work that never actually makes it to the page. I think it’s important, to at least imply some kind of logical consistency even when it's not outright stated.

My original plan was for Bertha to die on this page. The Bastard would have cruelly crushed her in his hand. But by the time we were writing this, Peri had already fallen in love with her, and was determined to let her live on. I think she had the right idea– it’s just plainly more fun to have the rocket launcher stick around in some capacity rather than kill her off the instant she’d served her purpose in this arc, and I think it adds to the sense that the narrative is a continuous flow of events and not a series of disconnected arcs. 

Peri parades:

Rule of threes, baby!

There’s nothing I love more than a story element that comes back. Especially when you least expect it. One of the joys of a long running narrative is to leave these little loose ends for yourself all over the place, which you can tug on later to make the audience go, “OH SHIT! I forgot about that!” It’s just so fun. Plus as a writer, if you ever find yourself stalling out for ideas you can grab a couple of those threads, tangle them up together and go “hm, does that look like anything?” 

Bertha is in the perfect sweet spot for this kind of “loose thread”. Leaving a gun lying around isn’t that big of a deal–if we never had a chance to circle back and show what became of it, the audience wouldn’t feel disappointed or like anything was left unresolved. But she’s still memorable enough that when she does show up again, you’ll immediately go, “Oh yeah, it’s Nix’s old gun!”

What exactly Bertha could do took a minute to puzzle out. I think the plan at first was to knock her out of the story for awhile longer, but at some point inspiration struck. Chapter 3 already had a planned fight between the Chained Hands and our heroes, and I realised it would be really quite funny if the hands had a bazooka, and would be a fun twist to add tension to that fight. 

Peri postscripts:

Yeah, that sounds about right. We’ve already seen the hands defeat Nix once here, so watching them fight the heroes in Chapter 3 in exactly the same way risks having repetitive action beats. Giving the angel with a gun keeps things fresh, and keeps the stakes notching up by a manageable incremental amount. Besides, who doesn’t love the image of an angel with a gun? It’s so incongruous that it adds some enjoyable levity to the scene.

The final argument for keeping Bertha around was that the worlds crossing over is a core part of Foreach, and we wanted it to be clear that the bleed over is increasing as time goes on. From that perspective, removing crossover elements immediately after they’re introduced runs counter to our long term goals! Better to have it stick around and continue to introduce enjoyable havoc.

We’ll leave you now with the first artwork I drew depicting this turn of events: