CQ Retrospective (Chapter 3 - Part 1)

 Sorry for the wait! It's time for:

You know, I really don't care for this title page. A lot of story elements still hadn't been decided on by the time I drew it, and the composition isn't great. The big Nightmare Knight hand reaching down toward Cucumber might seem like a weird choice (because it is,) but it was a choice I made based on a thing that didn't actually end up happening in the final version of the story. More on that later.

The Flower Kingdom's secondary theme is "fashion," so I wanted Botanica Springs' plaza to feel like a trendy shopping mall under a big canopy of flowers. 

This was based on those shots in Sailor Moon where Uranus and Neptune coolly leave a scene. You can imagine the appropriate music, if you want.

It's Rosemaster. As with most characters, I didn't have a handle on her design or visual style in this first scene. I knew I wanted her to feel reminiscent of an Old Hollywood starlet, but I wasn't sure what that meant for her "look" other than the tinged margins and a pseudo-film grain. The margins I honestly regret--they weren't a flat color like the black margins for Count Legato, which made them ten times more of a pain for print.

So, Chapter 3 was pretty ambitious for me in a few ways. I tried to work more complexity into my writing, which worked in places and backfired in others. I imagine there will be a few "this line gave many readers the wrong idea..." notes throughout this episode, so bear with me.

Here's the first: many readers took this exchange to be flirtatious on Rosemaster's part, which makes sense, but wasn't what I intended. I think I changed "wedding" to "birthday" in the print edition.

It's revealed later that Rosemaster can control people who share names with flowering plants. The explanation that she just knows people's names by looking at them is pretty handwave-y, sure, but I didn't think there was any value to be gained by complicating it more than that.

Ugh, Dad.

Each of Rosemaster's speech bubbles has a script initial capital. This was a bit of a pain because I had to cobble together a library of letters as I went... The file looked like this:

(Yeah, "Q" was a problem.)

This line of hers might be the only one that doesn't start with a letter. I think it came out okay.

The panel on the left is fun in theory, with Noisemaster's visual style affecting Rosemaster, but I wish I'd put a little more care into it.

I struggled with the foreshortening here. I thought that as this series progressed, I'd have fewer moments where my old art was hard to look at, but man, I could do this panel a million times better today!

The big rose at the top of the city is the "relay" for Rosemaster's spell which is affecting everyone's memory. So... it's not supposed to be there, but it really looks like it is, huh?

Rosemaster is narrating, by the way. 

Here's the first appearance of Brambleby and Saturday as Mr. R and Azalea, and also Kings Sunflower and Aster as assistants. I said this in an earlier installment, but even though Brambleby was always going to have a secret identity, I didn't design it fully until this chapter.

In fact, the character who became "Mr. R" wasn't even meant to be Brambleby's alter ego at first. He was going to be a completely unrelated character named Amaryllis. His personality was about the same here, though.

I also experimented with making Saturday the flamboyant editor-in-chief and leaving Brambleby as her silent assistant (with...rose nipple pasties??) This would have been too obvious, though.

This is the earliest drawing of "Mr. R" proper. Not quite as beautiful as I wanted him to be.

Anyway, back to the comic. At this point, Nautilus has mysteriously disappeared from the party due to Rosemaster's interference, but the transition is very abrupt and ended up confusing a few people at the time. I have to hope it's a little clearer what's going on when you read the whole chapter in one go.

Also, this is probably the most effort I will ever put into a crowd scene, which is to say I don't put effort into crowd scenes.

I was watching a lot of trashy competition reality TV around the time I conceptualized this chapter, which led to this premise. I had a lot of fun with it.

This is all the design work I did for the other competitors.

For me, it's satisfying when an old character shows up after a long time to reap the benefits of me drawing like 500 pages since their last appearance. Cabbage, you look so polished!

Nautilus is suddenly in Rosemaster's lair without much explanation because the rest of the party had their memories altered after she was kidnapped. Again, this confused a lot of people at the time.

Rosemaster's lair is situated within the ruins of the Old Botanica, so I wanted it to have the vibe of an ancient structure, even if most of it is shrouded in darkness during these scenes.

Rosemaster's outfit changes in every scene, which was pure self-indulgence on my part. I'm really glad I did it, though, because it allowed me to play with her design and refine the parts I liked or didn't like.

Rosemaster is a trans woman, and I have mixed feelings looking back on the scene in which this is first mentioned. It was written from a place of wanting to make my work "inclusive," with an admittedly naive view of that meant. It should also be noted that my own understanding of gender was, let's say, underdeveloped at the time. 

I've been told by a number of fans that this aspect of Rosemaster's character meant a lot to them, or even in some cases that she helped them realize they were trans, which is amazing to me. For this reason, I don't feel regret when I reread this scene. But I have to say it's a bit clumsy, and I think the me of today would handle it much differently.

I think the drawings in this part still hold up, but the colors are a letdown... It's really that there's not much contrast here, which makes it less dynamic than it could be.

Liquus gets thrown on the floor once and then mopes about it for 400 pages, making him the best character I've ever written.

Rosemaster was meant to feel like a huge step up in power compared to Noisemaster and Mutemaster. Thinking about how the Nightmare Knight's "powered by fear" thing works, though, I guess each Disaster Master would be exponentially stronger than the last.

Page compositions like this where each panel is the same size are somewhat uncommon in CQ. I think they can sometimes make the reading order harder to determine, but it wasn't a problem here.

Almond's dress for the competition was fun to design, but it felt like a losing battle to make almond blossoms look significantly different from cherry blossoms.

This area was fun to design. Rosemaster's base is inside of the big tree that extends all the way up to the surface level.

It was hard to make Rosemaster's face, shrouded in shadow and with glowing red eyes, convey the kind emotion I wanted here. I probably could have just lifted (or at least lessened) the shadow over her eyes for this part.

Caboodle is wearing a tank top because I had become significantly more cowardly since I drew Brambleby wearing rose nipple pasties. Also, here's "previous panel as a light source" again, though it's pretty subtle.

King Sunflower's costume was another one-and-done design. I mostly just wanted Caboodle to get to wear something beautiful. I don't know what was happening at the top right there.

This is Princess Azalea's dress, so the flower on it is naturally meant to be an azalea, the same flower that Rosemaster is shown holding at the start of the chapter. In retrospect, think it would have been a better idea to drop the name "Azalea" at some point before presenting this kind of clue.

Yes, it's "Bring Me to Life". I genuinely didn't think the lyrics would be legible at the final upload size.

It's always fun when Peridot appears on her broom-wand because it's a free light source I don't have to think too hard about.

I started being a little less subtle about the foreshadowing here.

This panel layout is ambitious, and I think that it more or less reads as intended, but I can see a few places where it gets confusing... In panel 2, as an example, Almond should probably be swinging her sword the other way to point toward the next panel. I might also put the "Brings back memories, huh?" panel on the same row as "CATCH!", then start the next row of panels with the star in her hand. 

Peridot's legs look so bizarre in that last panel. They're supposed to be bent, but her big skirt makes that hard to read.

After Peridot spills the beans about the contest, there's another sudden jump. By this point, I think most readers had caught on, so it went over a bit better than the first.

After running off on his own, Cucumber encounters the Nightmare Knight. Originally, for some reason, he was first going to have a brief run-in with...

...Brisket Sweats? (And his assistant, Brussel Sprouts.) This would have been a really brief scene with no real purpose other than introducing Brisket as Bacon's brother. (Also, according to this script, Botanica Springs used to be called "Gardenville"? Must have been a placeholder.)

A few readers thought that Glitchmaster's appearance in the previous interlude was actually the Nightmare Knight, so I wanted to be a little more obvious about it.

As I've probably already said, my color sensibility developed a lot after Chapter 2. This scene's colors are way more restrained than they would have been if I'd drawn it earlier in the comic.

Cucumber doesn't remember where he got the wand because he got the wand at Saturday's (i.e., Azalea's) hideout. Also, the Nightmare Knight's use of a contraction here was meant to be significant; he has misgivings about the wand, but is warming to Cucumber regardless. (I mentioned this in an earlier installment, but I was super particular about this kind of thing!)

Calabash and Walnut would have been the second hero duo. Can you imagine Cucumber with fingerless gloves?

This page has "panels" divided without the usual margins, which probably happened because there were already traditional panels layered on top of it, and I didn't want to overcomplicate the Photoshop file.

I don't think I came up with the concept for this page before I started working on it. Some readers thought there were "meta" implications here, like "bro what if the Nightmare Knight is going to bust out of the comic to change his destiny" but I just thought it would be more fun to look at than a rift opening up in the ground.

The Nightmare Knight doesn't really have any particular reason to be so hard on Carrot here other than making himself look like a jerk.

This scene is probably the most serious CQ had been up to this point. Something I mentioned in an earlier episode was that, as I kept writing, I leaned more into making my characters "characters" rather than vehicles for jokes. Tonal shifts like these may be unwelcome for some readers, but I really liked exploring Almond's character a bit more genuinely from here onward.

...Uh, so, since we're talking about tone... Remember when I said the Nightmare Knight's hand on the cover illustration was based on a scene I ended up scrapping? Originally, in this scene, the Nightmare Knight and Cucumber...

...were going to play rock-paper-scissors. Y'know, for funsies??

It was one of the very, very first CQ-related scripts I ever wrote, and I was really attached to it, so it took me a long time to admit to myself that this kind of gag scene wouldn't work well here. (The script is still kind of funny, though, so it could possibly be repurposed...)

Anyway, that does it for this episode. See you next time!