Commentary: Page 1 - 4

Page 001 - By the Lake

I distinctly remember this page’s title was chosen because I was worried that the body of water on this page wouldn’t read as a lake. A little extra insurance against misinterpretation. It’s a comically silly thing to be concerned about, in hindsight. Not only does it not actually matter if this is a lake or an ocean, but, like, who is even checking the page titles. It’s one of the few regrets I have about this comic, since I totally could have (and perhaps should have) picked something more thematically significant for the first page. Oh well! I’m the only person who cares about this sort of thing anyway.

This first page looked different, originally. Here’s how the first panel looked at first:

And here’s how it looks now:

That’s right: my patented spot colour technique for differentiating characters hadn’t been formalised yet! At this point in the comic, I had very different plans for the art style– I was going to do the first chapter in essentially pure black and white, and then after that I was going to try hiring a colourist for the future of the comic. In the interim, I figured I’d just indicate which character was which with a glow around their head in the first panel where they appear, and then rely on the audience to remember who’s who from then on out.

That rapidly proved to be a highly questionable idea. It worked for the first page, at least, but my friends reading it were mentioning they were probably going to get confused about which characters were which as the cast got bigger. I came up with the spot colour idea as a more permanent way of indicating which characters are assigned to which text boxes, and I really liked how that looked. I like to think of this decision as one of the first signs that hiring a colourist was never gonna happen.

While we’re here, let’s talk a little bit about the character designs of these three:

• Jasper is based on a samoyed. Their facial expressions often carry that puppyish affection you get from dogs, which helps express their friendly and people-pleasing personality. Their fluffy neck and big round glasses are meant to add to their friendly disposition, while their disproportionately tall neck gives them a bit of teenage awkwardness. The tallness of their frame also offsets their adorability just enough to give them a sense of maturity underlying their sweetness. They wear loose-fitting summer clothes (an idea from Rhys!), which evokes a slight awkwardness in their relationship with their body, but also suggests their carefree nature. 

• Sunny is based on a tree goanna. She's meant to be the exact opposite of an anime girl, all stout and blokey, and her chunky physical build reinforces this. It is in particular based on the squat and flabby look that is typical of monitor lizards and goannas. Despite that and her flat-headed baldness, she still expresses a jockish kind of femininity-- tank top, prominent eyelashes. It's not that she's entirely rejecting feminity, but that she settles into an unconventional idea of femininity that works for her. Her face is geared to carry her oversized personality as well. Her eyes are big and expressive, though they naturally sit in a halfmoon shape that befits her attitude, and her mouth is able to expand to great sizes when she starts yelling. She's short, but her body language gives her an energy that allows her personality to fill the room anyway.

• Moon-Soo is based on a moon bear. He's got a large and heavyset frame, but his soft edges and restrained body language keep him from feeling intimidating. Just like a moon bear, his face is pretty small compared to his head, and his little glasses visually confine his facial expressions, which emphasises his stoic nature. While Rex and Sunny have prominent snouts that are able to deform their silhouettes when they open, Moon-Soo's snout is short, stubby, and doesn't change shape when his mouth opens up. He dresses like a dude who doesn't think much about fashion, just a t-shirt and cargo shorts. He's chill! Like a mountain, he stands where he stands and lets the world flood around him.

Anyway. This first page is basically pure exposition. I’m very happy with how it turned out because I managed to fit a lot of expository information here within the confines of a natural-feeling conversation. Let’s analyse that:

This first stretch of dialogue is basically entirely inconsequential. It helps to establish character, sure, but the main reason it’s here is to basically “set the course” for the next few lines, which do introduce important information.

Moon-Soo being 17 and 11 months is a decision made entirely to make this one scene go a little smoother – we get a nice, breezy segue into the characters discussing how little they see each other these days. This could have been an awkward way to start a conversation, but by having the characters stumble into it, I think it feels more like a natural conversation flow. And from there, we transition into Jasper’s obligations, and then we set up the topic of the next page.

Three important bits of information have been set up, but it’s done in a way that establishes character, creates intrigue, and doesn’t feel like it has the hand of the author puppeteering the characters into saying what needs to be said. Fun stuff!

Page 002 - Automotives

Character voice is an important thing in writing, at least for me. It’s almost certainly the Homestuck influence, but when I write I try to make sure each character has a different way of speaking that is communicated through their dialogue. It helps you get a sense of who someone is with a small amount of dialogue, and when your cast starts ballooning, as Foreach’s will in time, distinct voices can help your readers stay on top of who’s who. 

There’s a lot of components to this: punctuation, filler words, vocabulary, even the “poetry” of how they talk. Jasper is peppy, uses a lot of exclamation points, and paces himself out with filler phrases like “So!” and “Ahhhhh”. Sunny is very vulgar, and she has a very colloquial edge to her speech, but she also has a habit of speaking in very poetic patterns and has a wide vocabulary. She’s smarter than she looks! When she needs to pace herself she’ll usually use a full phrase like “bein’ perfectly frank”. Moon-Soo is measured, he speaks very directly without any filler at all, and as an extra little bonus he speaks entirely in lowercase (a little cheat I used to make him seem more monotone).

A lot of these decisions aren’t consciously made, instead I imagine the kind of person the character is and try to write in a way that I think that kind of person would speak. But that’s not to say it’s an entirely unconscious process. A lot of voice does involve active effort, and my editor Peri does a lot of good work pointing out places where I’ve broken some of my rules for which characters say what. You can’t rely entirely on your gut when working with a cast of this size, not really, so there’s going to be places where you need to have your rules for who says what in mind. 

One sneaky little tech I use to keep Foreach being a page turner is how pages end.

I wouldn’t call these “cliffhangers”, so much, but more that each page ends with a question that the next page promises to resolve. Small bits of information are teased out over time so you have at least one thing to give a shit about at a time. This is especially important early on in the comic, where the reader hasn’t yet been given an active investment in the characters or their struggles. Instead of taking for granted that you care about these guys on a broader level, I give you a little thing to care about on each page to drive you to keep clicking that “next” button.

This isn’t something I’m super religious about, necessarily, but I pull it in more pages than I don’t. And it helps a lot with pacing! It gives the story a real sense of momentum where the events occurring on every page drive forward into the next. Without something like this, a story can feel very stop-and-start, very meandering, and it ends up requiring a more active motivation to push through and keep reading.

Page 003 - Ghost Shit

More exposition on this page. There’s a lot of important info that needs to be established here, but… it’s hard to establish it when presumably every character already knows it. Let’s start with an easy one, though: Jasper’s dad, Rex, is dead.

It’s not hard to communicate this though. A ghost shows up, and Jasper calls him “Dad”, easy as. But that leaves infoes two and three, which are a bit trickier: Jasper’s friends know Rex is dead, and they can’t see ghosts.

If you can’t make something explicitly clear, and need to exposit it more subtly, I find it helps to reiterate it. Find natural ways to bring up the information, and even if they’re not that obvious on their own, if you let them accumulate the audience will eventually figure that out.

In Foreach I need to establish something important– only Jasper can see ghosts. But Jasper knows this, and all Jasper’s friends know this, so who would ever think to mention this? My best bet is to have the characters act in ways that only make sense if this is true, and let you figure it out on your own.

Here, we’re given a few signs:

• Moon-Soo asks if Jasper is talking to his dead dad. This question only makes sense if Moon-Soo can’t see the glowing green ghost in front of him, and furthermore, he knows that if there were a ghost, he wouldn’t be able to see it.

• Rex mentions that Sunny and Moon-Soo don’t have The Sight. We aren’t told what The Sight is (and the term never comes up again), but enterprising readers might use their knowledge of urban fantasy fiction to figure it out.

• Moon-Soo later questions why the cars are floating, despite the obvious answer being that it’s related to the booming evil ghost who just showed up. Once again, this is easily explained by him not being able to see or hear the ghost.

Even if you don’t figure it out from this information combined… it doesn’t hugely matter yet anyway, you won’t be actively confused by the events in the story if that’s the case. But if you ever find yourself puzzling over why the characters act the way they do, the accumulation of information will eventually flip that switch in your head.

While we’re here, let’s talk about Rex’s design. Rex is a dog, like Jasper, but where Jasper is like a fluffy lapdog, Rex is a hound. His ears are pointed and alert, and his snout is a sturdy and reliable brick shape, although he's still able to open it up wide for his characteristic grins. His eyes are sealed shut, giving him an emotional distance from the viewer and his surroundings. With no eyes to ground his expressions, he feels just a little less personable and a little harder to relate to. The eyes sap him of his vulnerability, which works for him, since he likes to project the image of the invulnerable, all-knowing patriarch. Despite that, his big floating eyebrows keep him expressive and boisterous, like an ideal Australian dad ought to be. Similarly, his big round body projects a kind of humility-- he's not some kind of rippling muscular action hero, he's a guy who's not concerned about the shape of his body, the kind of guy you can chuck back some beers with round the TV while you watch the rugby. 

Page 004 - Appeal

Here we are– the first Debate in the comic.

This is an important page in the comic, because it’s one where I burned out on it before I could finish all the panels I wanted to do. And I felt like shit about that! As a result, it’s a pretty light page artwise. There’s a few panels at the start and end but there’s a veritably heroic block of text smack bang in the middle. And you know what?

Nobody gave a shit!

As it turns out, my ideal words-to-panels ratio was entirely invented, and only existed in my head. Turns out the big block of text reads fine! This was an important lesson for two reasons. The first was that it gave me peace of mind in future when having large stretches of dialogue with no pictures. The second was that it basically vanquished a lot of my perfectionism surrounding the comic. It’s easy to get fixated on all these little details when in practice nobody really cares about all those little details as long as they’re being carried by the story.

Rhys has a saying he got from his animation course, which goes “could be better”. You look at the thing you’ve drawn, you say “could be better” and then you move the fuck on! Peri, too, has a related saying, which goes “Perfect is the enemy of good, Good is the enemy of done”. Better get the thing finished than agonise over every little detail.

So far I’ve never had a page suffer an unplanned delay, which I’m pretty proud of so far. And part of the reason for that is my willingness to cut corners. The best kind of story is a story that reaches its ending. Gods willing, I’ll get there soon enough.

As for the page itself… the debate is deliberately written kind of cheesily, here. This is meant to be an “ideal debate” between Jasper and ghost, one which goes through as cleanly as possible, and where Jasper achieves his goals easily. It helps serve as a contrast to debates later in the comic, and the messy confrontation between friends that happens on the next page.

The ghost, Rodney, is a pretty minor character in the grand scheme. He’s meant to be a lion. Originally he was going to be a hog named Hogan, but I wanted a design that contrasted Rex a little considering he’s the second ghost introduced. It’d be hard, and maybe sacreligious, to design a hog without a big round belly like Rex already had. Instead I went with an indistinct leonid kind of guy, with a top-heavy frame suggestive of a muscular figure.

Peri’s Thoughts: 

Peri here, editor-extraordinaire and self-proclaimed cool rat. This is it: the very first page that Lum asked me to edit! In the beginning it was very informal. Lum had an early script of this page and they were having trouble getting the back and forth of the dialogue to flow well. I had a reputation among our friends of being a good beta reader. They asked me to take a look and–voila! Turns out I’m a bit of a monster with the red pen, which was exactly what they were looking for.

The first draft of this page suffered from two main problems. First, Jasper addressed the ghost in a sort of halfway old-timey Shakespearean voice. Second, Jasper and Rodney took turns monologuing at each other in big blocks of text. For the first problem, we decided to lose most of the old-timey language, keeping only the “O Great Spirit!” address, which shows that Jasper respects the ghosts they’re debating. It also creates the sense that the exorcisms have a bit of a “script” to them, which makes sense given that the Mundy family has been passing along their ghost-busting techniques for generations. Throughout the rest of the debate, Jasper uses modern language but still speaks in an intellectual and precise way–which makes sense given their formidable reputation as a debate team champion!

The second problem had an easy fix–we just broke up the text blocks and interspersed them with each other. If I remember correctly, we barely even had to change anything at the sentence level, merely break them up and change the order. The change was simple but the effect was enormous–breaking up the text blocks gives the debate more of a back-and-forth feel, gets rid of the eye-glazingly chunky paragraphs, and as a final bonus it makes the page feel longer and more substantial without adding any more words.

Another interesting thing when looking back on this page is the ghost design. So far we have two ghosts, Rex and Rodney. Besides the swirly tails, they have pretty different designs. Rex is outlined in green but has no color fill, while Rodney has no outline but is colored in solid green. We didn’t codify the rules for ghost designs until Chapter 2, and it actually took quite a bit of back and forth to settle on a look. (But we’ll talk more about that later!) These days, keeping track of character design consistency is one the things I regularly help out with as the editor, but at the time the comic was so new that there wasn’t a norm to compare against yet. Besides, I was helping out in such an unofficial capacity at the time that I doubt I would have felt it was my place to bring it up! And I do love Rodney’s look, so I don’t mind him sneaking in as a legacy design that doesn’t quite match the others in the comic.

Anyway, apparently Lum liked the work I did on this page, because they ended up sending me the scripts for the next few pages as well. We fell into a bit of a rhythm where Lum would send me the scripts on Monday or Tuesday, I’d send them back comments by Wednesday or Thursday, and then they’d be ready to jump into drawing the panels by Friday. (Well, Friday for me, Saturday for them. This is a rare instance where timezones actually worked in our favor, since they could send me the scripts before they went to bed and then I could be awake in the morning my time to edit them while they slept.) Before I knew it, I wasn’t just a friend taking a look here and there, I was a regular editor, giving feedback on upcoming character designs and kibitzing on the outline for plot threads that were still chapters away. And I couldn’t be happier doing it!