Comic Sketches: September - October 2023

HELLO once more, my wonderful, lovely readers and patrons! Miss your old commentary writer??? AustinWynn and Victoria did a wonderful job holding down the fort for me in my brief vacation stint, but I'm glad to be back in this particular saddle.

We got a lot of catching up to the comic to do, so without further ado, let's get into it!

These first couple of boards were handled by Tyson. Still a lot of high energy, dynamic angles and action, like, get a load of that dutch angle on panel 2094! Get outta here. This whole post-Incursion segment was very intensive to make at the time, but looking back on it now, I'd say all the effort was worth it. Sometimes a good action scene is just what you need to inject a little rizz into your long form webcomic.

Sharp eyed viewers will notice there's an extra panel that didn't make it to finals on that top row there. Originally, we were supposed to get a glimpse of ghost Seinru, but we felt like that was unnecessary and kind of interrupted the flow of movement between the hand shots. Definitely the right move to take it out, because those two panels flow smooth like butter together without that pesky interloper in the middle. Sometimes less really is more.

These next sketches were made by Diz:

Hey Edolon, how come your evil matesprit lets you have a cool shapeshifting monster weapon? Is this allowed?

Regardless, they really weren't kidding when they said they'd never be truly gone, huh. Who could have foreseen this distinctly literal bent to such a sweet, creepy sentiment! We'll be taking a clearer look at Seinru's current state later, but this little plot nugget is something we'd been looking forward to hinting at for a long time.

Again, the angle on that first shot is KILLER. I really like how Edolon is just an ominous mass of Doom-fueled energy from this far away. For the finalized schematics in the middle panel, we just ended up nabbing some Real Life rocket schematics from google and then posterizing the HELL out of it. Because when you make a serialized webcomic with thousands of individual panels, sometimes you just have to go "well I don't need to be drawing all of that by hand today."

From this moment on, we are fully in the Ciro Sketch Zone. And I have to say, I just adore the way he manages to impart movement here. Look at these beautiful scribbles! They communicate a sense of physical impact - an explosion of energy - extremely well. You can feel Edolon just bursting out of that cloud of smoke. It's delicious.

KILLER perspective on that spear. We all love a good bit of dramatic foreshortening, don't we? Hey, speaking of, did you know that Edolon's scary stabbing implement was based off of Yoru's spinal cord sword from Chainsaw Man part 2? Now you do.

Other than that, man. Edolon's starting to look kinda pissed, huh? I guess Sestro's Mind bullshit wasn't a part of his plan. Maybe it's getting to him a little.

YEOWCH, that's gonna sting later. Too bad Sestro doesn't have a kindly marsupial consort on standby to give him a convenient potion and make his booboos all better. That's main character privilege for ya!

What a stare down! I really like the contrast between Edolon's angry snarl and Sestro's slack Mind-puppet face, followed by that really intense look. Not a whole lot of dialogue in these last few pages as we focus on the BLOOD PUMPING ACTION, but that's about to change with Sestro's little gambit...

Before we get into all the juicy stuff involving the ABYSS (which I'm sure you're all dying to get into), let's take a quick detour into boards again!

Now, I don't think this has been mentioned so far, but Austin was actually helping us out with some initial storyboard drafts for the latter half of post-Incursion! He'd lay out some general ideas and then one of the other board artists would clean those up a little as needed; it helped speed things along and make sure we were working within the Vision for the scene.

Buuut, you might have noticed that the segment above looks very different than what ended up happening in the comic. And that's because in the original plan, we actually DIDN'T have Sestro pulling that mind-jacking move and meeting Edolon inside the Abyss for a quick heart-to-heart! Can you believe that???

As you can see, the idea was for them to just continue their anime fight and get up to MORE crazy bullshit ad infinitum. However, during one of our weekly directorial meetings, we were going over the script and discussing things and came to the conclusion that... it wasn't a very interesting closer to this confrontation, just more of the same. Then we started brainstorming a way to make this scene better, and went hey, what if Sestro pulled an Executive and tried to do a similar memory overload thing, but with an explicit offensive intent? 

Needless to say, everyone was jazzed about this new direction. It was infinitely more original, fun and character-driven, and acted as a fantastic followup to all the criticism that Sestro had to sit through from Brain!Clarud the last few times he showed up, not to mention being a bridge to officially introduce some key lore concepts earlier than we thought we'd be able to. So, we bit this bullet and scrambled to rework storyboards and come up with concept art on the fly and bingo, we suddenly had a banger on our hands! It was kind of a last-second change, which we try to avoid as much as possible, but hey, sometimes it happens. All for a good cause.

On to the final revised boards! First one was done by Tyson, second one by yours truly. You probably figured this out at this point, but we never miss the opportunity to make use of the Unexpected Long Panel Maneuver. Following panel sketches are Tyson's!

Man, I love this panel. What a fun, twisty callback to this fraught moment between Sestro and Clarud! Tyson initially tried going with a similar low-perspective shot, but since Sestro and Edolon are so close together here, we thought that we wouldn't be able to show Sestro holding on to Edolon very clearly. So, we ended up going with a more dead-on profile shot, which I think helped with the readability of the scene without hurting the reference to the original shot, since the colors are doing a ton of heavy lifting and the composition is similar enough.

Aaaaand here we go, into the belly of the beast. Just what did Sestro get himself into? I don't think our brave little Corporate Heir expected to be transported into this weird, creepy mindscape. Just goes to show how much of a twisted cycle path Mr. Vryche is. Or is that really all there is to it?

Time for concept art! This one was drafted by me and then polished by Tyson. The Abyss is an important enough place that it deserves its own specific palette shift.

There were two main points of reference for it: one, Sestro's Mindscape. Obviously, they look wildly different to each other, but we wanted the Abyss to evoke a similar tie in to the Doom aspect colors that Sestro's does to Mind. The second one, which is the much more direct reference, is the brief glimpse we got of it when Lefty was thrown into the Harbinger's portal. I wanted the background to be reminiscent of what we'd already seen there, and we also used Lefty as a guide for what the other Doombound souls would look like in there. Also of note, those very distinctly Light-colored vines! Aren't they interesting? Wonder if they might have something to do with a character we're about to see again...

You just love it when simply explaining design decisions also doubles as a lore dump.

No sketch for this one, because Tyson just free-styled it. Hey, doesn't that doomy soul in the middle there look conspicuously familiar?

Oh god, Edolon's about to go on a plot-relevant rant again. Somebody needs to stop him.

I believe that this is the first time the term "thaumaturgy" has been used in the comic. We'll get a bit more into it eventually, but you folks get a bit of extra Advanced Lore: thaumaturgy is an older, powerful practice that is very, very similar to alchemy. You could say that alchemy is a formalized, step-by-step methodical dissection of thaumaturgy that is easier to practice, if more restrictive in its applications. Neat, huh?

There's no Seinru sketch here because we still hadn't gotten their concept art from Heather yet. Speaking of:

The triumphant return of everyone's favorite manipulative girlboyfriend! You simply love to see it.

HEATHER: I wanted them to be very Light focused, what with it being their emanant aspect, and also have them puppeting the homunculi with the shadow creature look.

Other than making Sestro look so very small, this panel also has the added benefit of teasing Edolon's fresh new look before you get to see the whole of it. It's all about building anticipation.

For the dialogue, it truly is "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" hours, as is often the case with this motherfucker. Edolon, being uniquely positioned in this story as a character who has access to a lot of insider information about the universe and how it functions due to his status within the Harbingers, often says things that are very much truthful... just sifted through the perspective of the cult he's a part of. Dude is crafty with his words.

First, Diz also helped out with the sketch on this panel. Second, you gotta appreciate a good dramatic fit reveal. You simply GOTTA. This was very important to not only deploy a location name-drop, but also to ensure Edolon remains the undefeated reigning champion of dramatic one liners, which is a title that's very important to him.

Can you believe that it took a full four people to completely figure out this guy's clothes? He doesn't even deserve a fashion team... tsk.

I started it off with the base concept of the white flowy shirt, purple pants and bloody crown of thorns combo, but still felt that something was missing. Diz then suggested we add a sleeveless coat to it, then Xam tweaked it so it had those pointy shoulder pads and tail, until FINALLY Tyson applied the Abyss color palette to it. We have lovingly dubbed it the "Evil Jesus Fit".

I'm sure the fact that this is how Edolon appears in this ambiguous mental landscape is a sign of how normal he feels all the time.

Edolon sure is sounding very confident for someone currently in the middle of a surprise mental intrusion. By one of their enemies, no less! And I bet he's so proud of that little Mind related pun at the end of the page (I am because I added that in).

Sketches from now on have been done by ME, your friendly commentary writer! I seem to always get stuck with the panels where Edolon is sporting a different flavor of evil grin, go figure. Anyway, I'm pretty proud of how I managed to convey Ghost!Seinru's evil little smile with but a single eye. Can't you just hear their creepy giggles?

Some interesting points to note: it seems like Edolon is aware of the stunt Clarud pulled with Sestro. Internally, we figured that he'd be able to feel out what was going on with Sestro's mind, given the alchemy-powered link they have in this scene, but he also doesn't seem that surprised at the confirmation. Probability knowledge at play once more? Very likely.

Hell yeah, Sestro, put those alchemy skills to work!

Our guy has kind of gotten his ass beat in this fight, but let's not forget he HAS been studying this stuff his whole life. Whatever Sestro may lack in combat experience, in this instance he pretty handily manages to make up for in quick, outside-of-the-box thinking and the element of surprise.

It was also fun to figure out how to convey the fact that he's flinging Mind bubbles at Edolon. I thought there should be some indicator of movement besides the bubbles themselves, so I came up with this idea to have these "strings" around Sestro that he was using to pull the bubbles. We see some precedent of this visual in the scenes with Brain!Clarud, so it also worked out as a callback.

Aw, Ghost!Seinru is trying to protect him! Isn't that cute? Evil love wins.

It's always a treat when I get to work on BIG expressions in these panels, and this is my favorite part of Sestro's little Mindscapade. It's the first time we've seen Edolon actually - dare I say it? - scared in the comic. All the times he's shown up, he's been more or less in control of the situation, so I think it's telling that the one thing that's managed to break him so far is this barrage of distilled memory, which likely involves a lot of moments he was present for, only from Clarud's perspective.

I don't think he likes thinking about his past very much.

A lot of emotions happening in here, folks. The hurt is being transmuted into anger and generalized yelling, but you can't fool me, mister. I see that tear threatening to spill in the corner of your eye there. He REALLY needs to work on his aggression, sheesh.

And immediately jumping to accusations too! It's like they say, denial is a river in Egypt. I don't think Sestro would be able to outright lie to Edolon with this move, even if he wanted to. A little outside the scope of Mind.

Goodnight, sweet prince... you tried your best. Sometimes even channeling your daddy issues into spite isn’t enough.

And we close this confrontation off with a very menacing Edolon looming over poor Sestro. Isn't it fun how he unintentionally finishes Sestro’s thought for him? We did that.

This leaves us with our very last batch of boards for this commentary post! It always fascinates me how Ciro manages to make his boards look so clean. This thing is practically in the sketch stage already! Crazy.

In an extremely unfortunate turn of events, a communication mishap happened during production which resulted in Ciro drafting a repeat of a panel that was already being worked on. It's such a shame to see banger art like this go to waste, BUT at least we managed to repurpose that background for a few panels in a later section! Reuse, recycle, reduce is the name of the game. And hey, at least you guys get to see it in all its unrealized, full HD glory.

As was written in the stars (by which I mean earlier-future updates that said this had happened) the secondary cast is once again in the picture - specifically, Hayyan is coming in clutch to save our Corporate Heir from instant Doom-axe death. I do love to see Repiton's more modern cyperpunk brand firearms again.

Thank god someone finally killed this guy. I'm so glad we won't have to worry about him ever again.

Other than making Hayyan look badass, this little closeup was made to highlight his yellowblood survival ability, Golden Eye! It's going to be name-dropped for the first time in the following pages, but here's a little summary of what it does:

Allows the troll to zoom into long distances or close details, using their eyes as binoculars or magnifying glasses. The pupils increase or decrease in size when zooming in, like a camera shutter.

So, in the words of his creator, Neptune, Hayyan has "weird sniper vision". The secondary purpose of his survival ability is to make his eyes look really fucking cool. Yellowbloods and their eye stuff, am I right?

BEAUTIFUL crowd shot from Ciro here. It's always a little scary when we know Oricka's mech is going to be featured in a panel, but we survived this one. Mostly by Frankensteining a bunch of older shots together and editing as needed. I don't know about you guys, but I find drawing robots so fucking hard, so I will avoid doing that as much as physically possible. And Sirage bapping a homunculus is just a delightful addition.

Alas, he endures. That Doom goop flowing through his veins is just too powerful.

HOW WILL OUR HEROES GET OUT OF THIS ONE? TUNE IN NEXT MONTH TO FIND OUT!

And that will be all for this month's comic commentary! Thanks so much for tuning in. We will resume this next month, with the rest of post-Incursion and a breakdown of the Talald flash!

Keep it cool out there, folks. Seeya!

- Eddie, Austin and Heather