Comic Sketches: July 2022

And after a brief November interlude, the comic commentary is BACK, baby!!! Did you miss it? Because it missed you, dear reader.

This time we're FINALLY getting to the much anticipated/beloved/despised Murrit Crafting Section™. Took us a while but we got there, gang. And guess what? Again, we had much more to say than I previously expected. So, again, we'll be breaking this down into multiple parts instead of cramming everything into a huge massive post. Sanity preserving tips.

As a sort of broad opening statement, I can say that (much like our many other experimental adventures in the past) it was both a great deal of fun and a different kind of work from our usual fare, which got us itching to get back to said fare by the end of it! Not to say that we didn't enjoy making it, on the contrary. But one can only take so many fish-related hijinks before one needs a palate cleanser. 

Regardless, we're all VERY proud of how the segment turned out, and we think that it won't feel nearly as long and winding when people go through it archivally. Such is the curse of the ongoing long-form webcomic! Time gets stretched in weird ways when you're up to date.

Like I mentioned before, this time around I will be enlisting the help of our beloved Victoria Arachonteur to talk about all the nonsense Murrit got up to and the many interactive pages that were made along the way. Come with us on this journey.

The storyboards this time around were penned by Charlie, who also helpfully outlined the sprite panels while he was at it! Gaze into them very carefully, 'cause you won't be seeing a lot of those from here on out.

With an abrupt transition we are BACK to True!Murrit and the item hoarding nonsense he was last up to! The following sketches were all made by Lupa, who drew Tee Hanos in just such an incredibly cute way, which I'm sure he would not be happy about. He looks so very round.

Speaking of that guy, the cutaway from the Alt!Murrit drama to this panel with a command below it loudly stating "TEE HANOS" always cracks me up. I personally think that our platy-man has one of the stupidest names in the entire comic, which is really saying something, considering.

Unfortunately, we don't have any in-progress shots of this particular panel on hand, so Tyson's animatorly ways shall have to remain a mystery this time. You can still look at the closeup of Tee Hanos' very angry face and his secret rock, though.

I really like the narration on this page. It feels kinda poetic to me, with a nice balance between information-giving and pretty prose. And Murrit being given the title oneironaut is very significant - which is not a made up term, just in case people aren't familiar with it! The actual word means "someone who travels consciously through dreams", and with some very slight definition tweaking on our end, I believe it's clear why we'd pick that for a character that's about to dig through many iterations of transient, phantom not-quite-realities.

The term also acts as a sort of callback to one of the very first pages in the comic, where the poem A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allen Poe is quoted. Not to chew up all our themes into easily digestible mush, but y'know. Thought it'd be neat to point out!

Who's the one doing the "dreaming" in these cases, though? Hm...

Gonna be honest, I was REALLY missing some bonafide original flavor lighthearted Murrit shenanigans by the time these pages were rolling around, so it was a great time getting to read funny dialogue in their voice again.

VICTORIA: Murrit is truly one of the characters of all time. To me, she's effortlessly slotted into the rare and highly enviable position of "characters you can only really make successfully when you're entrenched in your own story". They're unbelievably funny in a way that feels both effortless and very high-effort, simultaneously. And y'know, that's a staple of Homestuck fan comic writing, but it's such a unique blend with him.

Absolutely agree. She's very self-indulgent on the author end, but still so fun to read! Which is a testament to both Austin's sense of humor and how well-written Murrit is, in my opinion.

VICTORIA: Also, extremely funny that Metatron is holding the grudge about Murrit being mean.

And one of the most critical and long-running mysteries in the whole comic, what does Murrit even have at the end of that chain, is finally put to bed. 

Here's a fun fact about these panels: Lupa just kind of threw the Pot of Greed card in there on a whim as a placeholder, but we all thought it was so ridiculous that we kept it. And then I foiled it up during finalization, because why not.

VICTORIA: One last thing I want to point out about the Pot of Greed page is that the character on the card sleeve is Lyna the Light Charmer, who is a post-hoc addition to an existing squad of 4 other characters from Yu-Gi-Oh, the Elemental Charmers. It's like poetry. It rhymes.

Can't have Murrit without also having some anime girls, I guess.

Now, this is the part of the post where we run into the trouble of not having sketches for a large chunk of the sprite panels. So what we're gonna do is just use the final comic panels as-is, because they're a helpful visual reference when we don't have any alternatives! Gonna be easier to keep track of what we're talking about this way.

Of course, Murrit had to keep the traditions of his adoptive criminal dads alive with the PURSE OF TIPPECANOE. Here is the fifth and final entry in a series of running presidential jokes that were started all the way back in I2S1, roughly a thousand pages ago. Good times! I'm gonna bring Victoria here to Explain the Joke, as I am not familiar with all the intricacies of USA-based politician humor, hailing from the distant lands of Brazil and all.

VICTORIA: So, it's actually kind of a one-two punch. William Henry Harrison was the USA president with the shortest term in office (just 31 days), because he died of⁠— Hold on let me google it.

(Victoria googles it.)

VICTORIA: Oh, it was pneumonia. As it happens in the 1800s. So, the term "purse of Tippecanoe" comes from the "curse of Tippecanoe", which is an urban legend that says all presidents elected during a year that ends in 0 die in office, since every president elected from 1840 to 1960 died in office. This is obviously just coincidental; Reagan didn't die until 2004 and George W. Bush is still alive, but it does mean that Biden has the chance to do the funniest thing ever. This part doesn't have to go in the commentary.

(I am putting it in the commentary.)

This is a good opportunity to show off the empty base Victoria made for Murrit's planet! It turned out just fantastic. We don't do a lot of sprite panels in the comic these days, so this whole segment was a great trip down memory lane. And the old-school sprite trappings remain extremely charming. Love the video game mouthfeel.

VICTORIA: These early crafting panels were my first experience with Clip Studio Paint and I really went apeshit with the slide motions on a lot of them, since keyframed animation tweens aren't something Krita does well. I was totally luxuriating in it. This panel specifically, with the tweening, clipped gradient over all the junk is so like... I was absolutely feeling the power here.

Gang, I'm not going to lie. Me and Austin suffered trying to come up with names for all these damn things. The average reader is probably just going to glance over that horrendous, gargantuan list of various crafting materials, but us? We had to stop and think about them. We had to look at all those little color variations of video game materials and come up with something that sounded vaguely appropriate. We bled for this. Nightmare scenario.

VICTORIA: Oh god the items. I kind of just went ham on making a bunch of assets, a lot of delightful recolors, because I fuckin' love it when games just blatantly reuse them like that. The only things I really have to note are that Murrit has 69 refined metals, which was the price of a Mann Co. Key in Team Fortress 2 at the time of writing. It's gone up to 71 since. The economy is in shambles.

I'm also very happy we got to canonize the term "stabdads" on this page! It's endearing, okay.

VICTORIA: Making the pixel art for this was actually kind of a blast, since pixel art is one of those things I love doing but is really more of a means to an end? Figuring out how to make a bunch of unique color schemes with a limited palette was also fun. Almost all of it uses the palette AAP-64, from this site here.

As a final note, keen eyed readers will remember that the reason Murrit's fancy Spider-Man 2 artifact is already registered in the item database is because Arcjec already nabbed it from a certain snakey vendor, many a page back.

I just love it whenever we get the opportunity to add diegetic game elements to the story like that. Plus, the intense perspective in this panel looks REALLY cool.

VICTORIA: Murrit isn't even looking at the screen the UI elements are supposedly on, he's looking at where they are on the panel, which is just so good to me.

And now that he has successfully cheated his way to level 13 and unlocked ADVANCED CRAFTING, we can finally get to the good stuff.

I've got a confession to make here. Back during this update's initial upload, we ended up changing the narration on this page because the mechanical explanations of the system were extremely wrong. And... I am the culprit. It's me.

Having severely misunderstood how everything was supposed to work during the editing process, I am taking this L. This happens sometimes, because I honestly have a hard time grasping the more technical aspects of certain mechanics in Vast Error, which Austin will then explain to me many times over until it finally lodges itself into my brain. What can ya do!

VICTORIA: Ain't that just the way. When we were talking about it, trying to figure out how to make it tangibly different from Homestuck alchemy while still kind of being the same was pretty difficult tbh.

You guys landed on a pretty good place, though. I really enjoy the gacha-esque elements that were added, because it feels like a very relevant "modern" addition to all the gamey stuff Homestuck was doing back in the day.

At long last, here we are. The very first Murrit-crafted item. Do we have any insightful thoughts about the LCD Soundshades?

VICTORIA: There is one thing: the lenses spell out boob.

You're absolutely right this is extremely insightful.

VICTORIA: The sort of LCD display it has is one I'm really fond of. It got used in a bunch of really cheap electronics in my youth, like the beloved knuckles soccer McDonald's toy and some sort of "game and watch" combination by Nintendo. It's a kind of retro that VE doesn't dip into that often despite its well-trodden retro grounds, and it's not something I see around as much in real life (for obvious reasons, they're kinda shit).

Here's another fun fact (that I didn't realize was true until Victoria told me literally right now)! The layout you see here, with the character select screen-esque grey background, is actually something that Murrit themself is seeing through the LCD Soundshades. Isn't that cool? MORE DIEGETIC INTERFACES LET'S GO!!!

VICTORIA: It's kind of incredible how sparse Homestuck alchemy binge pages were in hindsight, a lot of those panels are just a character sprite and the thing they made on a white background. I think that the sort of layout up above bridges the gap between the two pretty well; the angling on the inset that Murrit stands on and the layering of UI elements give it a sort of faux-depth that's missing in a featureless void.

And now we can feast our eyes on some lovely concept artwork from Victoria, who brought all of Murrit's awful, awful creations to life with Austin's help! Check this out:

As you can see, we had hentai on the mind even before we started getting all the many, many, many reader-submitted suggestions involving variations on that theme. Yes, we actually read a lot of those. Luckily, a large portion of the fanbase seemed to be very in-step with the stuff that we had already planned beforehand, which just worked out super nicely.

VICTORIA: Both of those images are forever saved as Clip Studio Paint materials. I can't bring myself to delete them.

Leave them there. It's containment.

VICTORIA: Murrit just lying through her teeth about making Arcjec a matching hoodie is so fucking funny.

Arcjec and Murrit are such a powerful combo for hilarious chatlogs, it's a shame we don't have more of those two together in the comic. Maybe we'll see Arcjec's side of this exchange at some point later down the line?

VICTORIA: The spunk bunker deliberately precedes the opening of reader commands, indulging in the classic game design pattern of letting a character do something with the game mechanics to demonstrate how they work and get a feel for them in a low-stakes environment, before throwing more complex and layered stuff at them. While Murrit doesn't necessarily need the demonstration, the reader does.

Sidebar, the (CLEAN) and (EXPLICIT) variants along with their description quotes might be some of my favorite jokes in this entire thing.

VICTORIA: I'm not sure how much it comes through, but in my mind, I always read the difference between "I don't WANT to fit in" and "I WANT to fit in" on the two spunk bunkers as like, poorly sentence-mixed YouTube poop editing. The exact same delivery, smash-cutting over the missing word.

VICTORIA: I almost wish this panel was also interactive, just so we could've made the most out of it. If I had all the power in the world, I would absolutely make Austin sit down and write out joke names for every single color on that hexagon.

The things we sacrifice for lack of time.

And now we've arrived to the much beloved BARBERTRON SEGMENT, which also happens to be a beautiful name for a baby girl. I distinctly remember being so delighted when Victoria first showed us this sketch! The way all these giant arms pop up out of nowhere brings me great joy.

VICTORIA: First thing, Murrit has this little wrist flex when she snaps and activates the Barbertron mode and it's the douchiest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. Second, it is so, so good to me that even when Metatron is pissed as hell, he can't not love his job.

I helped Victoria out by coming up with some hair preset options for the Barbertron, which was a lot of fun! I really like doing quick concept sketches like this. Still particularly fond of that first one on the top left.

Here it is, the star of the show in all its initial sketchy glory. This thing is Victoria's baby, so I'm gonna go ahead and let her do most of the talking.

VICTORIA: The drawing pages were inspired by a browser add-on that Homestuck fans ran with back in the day, which let you draw directly atop web pages. They'd be synchronized and shared with other people using the same bookmark on the same page, kind of like a drawpile or aggie or whatever it is the kids use these days. AND this is the first time that Purple Hot Mess plays in the comic! While it's obviously a Murrit theme in general, it has kind of become a musical theme for this whole section to me. It's such a banger. I still hear it every time I close my eyes.

The little interactive pages were one of the things we all were looking forward to the most, I think. It was great seeing everyone posting all the stuff they drew back when this first went live! Such a nice collective moment, you could feel all the hands joined in Murrit scribbles.

These are the tests we did when trying to figure out what Murrit's updated hairstyle was going to look like! The top sprites were made by Victoria and bottom ones by Xam. Our thought process went something along these lines: the top left option was too close to his old hairstyle and the top right one was just a little too neat and clean-cut for Murrit. We also liked the idea of them going with longer hair, and the low ponytail felt like just the right amount of slapdash while still seeming like there was some effort put into styling it. The perfect Murrit vibe.

Since the next few pages are mostly just Murrit crafting stuff, here's another grab bag of concept art that Victoria made! The paizuriphones are one of my favorite gears from this section so I'm very glad we ended up using it as a part of Murrit's new permanent outfit. Even if the name absolutely sucks.

VICTORIA: Woe, hentai terminology be upon ye! Looking back at it, Austin wanted something done with the boobdrones, and we hadn't arrived at the alfogram yet on our whirlwind tour of the worst things ever made, but he did suggest the name. Just know whatever I name these things, the term "paizuri" is going to be a part of it. Thanks boss.

Teamwork! For evil deeds.

VICTORIA: In a lot of ways, comic making is about digging yourself a very big hole and adamantly insisting it's all a joke. But man, we gotta have him use the Stylo for something at some point. I think it got kind of shafted by sprite mode proportions making it just impossible to make use of.

The Stylo was definitely inspired and personally, I love it.

VICTORIA: It really was! It's a blast to draw, even when it's tiny and unnoticeable, and it's a unique kind of visually messy that I think really adds a lot of texture to Murrit's whole deal.

Also, the more Gorillaz references we can sneak into whatever it is that Murrit is up to, the better.

VICTORIA: And we're already setting up the groundwork to fast-forwarding through crafting stuff, like. After the Barbertron, there's a panel where she alternates a TV into speakers, and in the future this kind of glue panel is something we can just excise, since we've done one of these segments before and the between-steps can be assumed. Also, that's the same speaker as in [S] Ellsee: Dance out your frustrations. 

As a final note, readers attuned to cute stabdads stuff may have noticed that the C4 sprite is the exact same one as the C4 under Deuce's hat in the Homestuck intermission. Awww.

VICTORIA: Actually. Art note, there's a mockup of all the UI for this that was built in Godot Engine, using real UI tools. After a while I gave up on that pipe dream and just made it the normal way you'd make a comic panel (in an art program), but there's a few remnants of that era in the art still. For example: the label on how many slots you want to equivalate an item into still uses the default Godot UI font. So, if I wanted to change it I'd have to go open up Godot, change that dropdown, screencap it and paste it back into Clip Studio Paint.

VICTORIA: This is like staring into the abyss.

Oh my god.

VICTORIA: In my defense, it was easier than making all those windows by hand.

Well. All THAT aside. The upcoming trollodex page, whose birth we are witnessing on this very panel, is probably my favorite interactive to come out of this entire endeavor.

VICTORIA: Yeah! It's definitely a fun page. One of the first questions I asked Austin when we started planning this segment was "what do these body pillows do". It hits an interesting point of tension with crafting systems like this almost immediately: how exactly do they work, both as a collection of materials (cotton, nylon, ink/crayon, etc.) and as a depiction of the character drawn on them? There's not really a wrong answer, but I think we gave it a strong one. There's similar systems in Homestuck (Dave's brain in a jar), but they're often prohibitively expensive as a way to shut down that line of thought. Aside from arguably the Autoresponder, using a depiction of the self as a crafting ingredient isn't really explored in Homestuck, and it's cool to wade into that murky water here. I love that kind of thing.

Here's the sketches of our protagonists' lovely Corporate ID photos! Going clockwise from the top left, they were made by me, Lupa and Olschu. The page took a while to put together, but I think it managed to package a lot of relevant information in very neat ways, with the added bonus of featuring running commentary from Murrit's POV about all of their friends. I find that kinda stuff very elucidating, and it's always a lot of fun to read/write. Biased narration is Vast Error's bread and butter, you guys know this by now.

VICTORIA: I have never related more to the executive than when he marked down "protect at all costs" on Arcjec and Ellsee's cards. It may very well be the only point we have in common.

Clarud was right twice in his life. And only twice.

VICTORIA: There's also the first appearance of Arcjec and Taz's new duds, which is a very classical non-linear storytelling thing. It's not something you've seen them wearing before now, so it's become a sort of landmark to keep track of and help put this nebulous ball of webcomic time into perspective with itself.

Lastly, I do want to point out what I think is a very endearing beat, which is the trend of Taz bringing out some unexpected emotional honesty from Murrit. It's an impressive feat that not a lot of people are capable of. She's just that powerful.

VICTORIA: I cannot believe I've drawn, in a very literal sense, Calder with his dick out. And it got put in the comic and posted.

Yeah I guess you technically did that. How does it make you feel?

VICTORIA: I would do it again in a heartbeat.

This is the sort of fervent devotion to the cause we need. Not even Calder's alien dick will stop you from doing what needs to be done.

VICTORIA: It's god's hardest fight, but I am their toughest soldier.

On that note, that's all that we have up our sleeves for today! We hope you guys enjoyed reading through what is basically mine and Victoria's edited DMs, and that it was sufficiently elucidating and/or entertaining. We for sure had a blast discussing this string of updates together, and you can expect to hear from both of us again in the coming month!

For now: stay cool, keep it sexy, and all that important stuff. We'll see you folks later!

- Eddie & Victoria