CQ Retrospective (Interlude 2)

Welcome back!

Interlude 2 was significant for the first proper conversation between Parfait and the Nightmare Knight. In anticipation of that...

I made an attempt to really figure out the layout of Parfait's room, but... it didn't help much in the end. I wonder if there was a different solution to the problem of fitting them in the same room together. 

We never see that much of the top floor, but I like her little painting area.

Earlier, I said I must have decided to lessen Parfait's accent during the Prince Crescendo play, but that was...apparently not the case! Still, it would have been appropriate for her to ham it up for Tomato here.

I learned after posting this page that "c'est dommage" is not as widely-known an expression as I thought. It's something my mom used to say a lot when I was a kid.

For the record, I don't speak French. As far as I can tell, "une bise" is a friendly kiss on the cheek--not quite the kind of kiss Tomato would be hoping for here. But I couldn't resist this stupid joke, and since Parfait obviously doesn't plan on kissing him any kind of way, I decided it didn't matter.

I looked forward to drawing these pages for years. It probably goes without saying that this was largely inspired by the Princess Peach interludes in the original Paper Mario... but more generally, I love the atmosphere of sneaking around big, open buildings at night.

As much as he pretends otherwise, the Nightmare Knight lives for drama. This page was extremely fun, and exemplified the kind of thing I liked to draw most. (I guess that hasn't changed too much.)

Back around this time, I was very resistant to the idea of people shipping Parfait with the Nightmare Knight. These days, I extremely don't care. It's not canon, obviously, but in 2020, I can finally acknowledge that the Nightmare Knight has major boyfriend energy. That's the resolution of my character arc.

I'm actually not sure why this scene ended up so saturated. I guess because I was still slightly in Noisemaster mode.

This definitely isn't the first or only instance of switching to local ("normal") colors to break atmosphere for a gag, but I'll point it out anyway. 

I'm still really fond of the last two close-ups of Parfait. This was the most I had drawn her up to this point, and I was finally starting to get a handle on her design.

I didn't think too hard about this reveal that Parfait doesn't pick up her trash when it misses the wastepaper basket. Her dark secret.

This page! I've said this already, but one of my big CQ regrets is that it took so long to get to this moment. Maybe the years of buildup made it rewarding?

Drawing is Princess Parfait's hobby. Whether she drew these images before or during the conversation is up to you. 

I remember this page having a million disorganized layers because of all the sheets of sketches and their respective drop shadows... I don't generally keep my layers very organized, though. I don't even name them 99% of the time.

Maybe it's a little unbelievable for the Nightmare Knight to successfully recover his dark lord facade after being revealed as a dweeb, but I feel like that's part of his charm. He never really shouts like this, so I hoped it would convey that he was still pretty flustered.

I could have made it a little clearer that the letter Parfait asked the Nightmare Knight to deliver was sitting on this table... A handful of readers thought the big reveal here was that he had drawn in her sketchbook.

Parfait's letter is read in its entirety in Chapter 3. I didn't think of this at the time, but now it's fun to imagine she designed the stationery herself.

This page was handwritten, like always, and the teardrop effect was achieved with the good old-fashioned blur tool.

There was going to be a bit more to this shooting star Parfait and Carrot encountered. If you've followed me on social media long, you might know that babies are delivered by storks in Dreamside. The "shooting star" was meant to be one of these celestial storks that had fallen off course, landing in the Caketown Castle courtyard. The idea got a little too complicated, and it wasn't really connected to the main story, so I left it open. (And, uh, Parfait and Carrot were not expecting, by the way.)

You might know now that the Nightmare Knight is referring to his failed attempt to make peace with the second Legendary Hero... But in a previously mentioned side story I planned, he also tried reaching out to a different Doughnut Kingdom princess. Obviously, that didn't work out.

Why is the letter glowing? The power of love, of course.

I remember wondering if the Nightmare Knight "cloaking/uncloaking" himself in this scene would read clearly, but it seems alright. I also struggled a bit with how to show Cordelia's ears from this angle... Would her hair really spill over them like that?

After this scene, the throne room is completely undamaged. One explanation is that this is just an illusion, but the better explanation is that the Nightmare Knight secretly came back after everyone left and tidied up.

The touch of purple reflecting off Cordelia's eyes is a good idea, but I wish I'd used it a bit more evenly... It makes her eyes look more rendered than anything else in the panel.

It was hinted at before, but this is the first scene where Cordelia really feels like Peridot's mom. To be honest, it was more of a joke at first, but the familial relationship between Cordelia and Peridot (and later the Nightmare Knight) is vital to all three characters.

I could have used warm light on Peridot's face in the last panel to make it feel a bit cheerier, but this is fine.

Another page I looked forward to for a long time. The perspective on that last panel looks obviously wrong to me, but I'm not sure I'd do it much better today. It can be pretty tricky to place characters alongside the Nightmare Knight like this, keeping both their expressions visible, when he towers over them.

It sure did take a while for this to pay off, huh? Piano and Ametrine were paired off initially because I thought the "rock" kingdom and the music kingdom having a good relationship would be cute. Also, I avoided spelling her nickname "Ammy" because it would have reminded me too much of Okami.

Wow, Carrot looks super weird in these panels. It's probably noticeable just from looking that he was my least favorite of the main cast to draw, which is a large part of why his design ended up changing in the next chapter.

At this point, the do-kids-even-know-what-this-is-ness of Nautilus' flip phone became too much to bear. Joke's on me, though, because I'm not even sure kids know what a yard sale is.

This color scheme doesn't quite fit Caboodle... which I guess is appropriate considering it's Cosmo in disguise, but I wasn't thinking of that at the time.

We don't really get to appreciate it until later, but Caboodle is pretty handsome. After his mask came off for this chapter, I wanted people to think, "Wait, don't put it back on!"

It's clear now that Cosmo is saying "Glitchmaster," but I remember there being some fun, off-base theories when this page was posted.

I really like the effect used for Cosmo's teleportation in the second-to-last panel, and I'm surprised it never made another appearance after this scene. It looks like a square Photoshop brush with the "flow" (and probably opacity) set very low.

Glitchmaster's first appearance, technically. The look of this scene was somewhat inspired by the Moonside area in Earthbound, down to Glitchmaster's dialogue boxes. (Earthbound was incredibly scary to me as a young kid. Something about its atmosphere still makes me a little uneasy. It's great, honestly!)

The pixel running through "dispensable" in the second-to-last panel is meant to represent a hitch in Glitchmaster's voice. She does have strong feelings about this, after all.

Again, heavy Earthbound influence. Glitch is the last of the Disaster Masters, so I wanted her to seem overwhelmingly powerful. The red, splotchy background makes this attack feel especially harsh, even though it's hard to tell what's actually happening. 

Glitchmaster's dialogue as the Nightmare Knight is pretty spicy. I like to think that, in a conflicted kind of way, she enjoyed acting out her ideal image of him.

There are a lot of disparate styles happening on this page. Not necessarily a bad thing, but obviously very experimental. 

It may go without saying at this point, but when elements of the comic art bleed off the page like in the top panel, it creates a headache for then-future-me to deal with while formatting everything for print. The nature of Glitchmaster's pages made for a lot of these headaches in the next chapter.

Direct sunlight is generally happy and positive in this comic; it was fun to make it more threatening here. 

The pivot from that serious confrontation to this stupid pizza gag really encapsulates the heart and soul of Cucumber Quest. More or less.

The first panel is a little strange, lighting-wise. Carrot, Almond and Cucumber are in the foreground, where I would normally paint them darker... but they have their backs to the window. It doesn't really matter that much in this scene, but I might have taken a less lazy approach to conveying this if something more serious were happening.

Some readers thought Cucumber and the others were literally being engulfed by the flames of the sun in that last panel. In retrospect, that is way funnier.

The Sun and Princess Sunshine's first proper appearance. There's a magical canopy between the Sun and the princess' gondola, as a flimsy explanation for how she can be so close to the Literal Sun all day every day without any of the negative effects you would expect under those circumstances.

The Sun themself has become significantly more important than I originally planned. For more on that... please look forward to the Chapter 6 Interlude.

Sunshine actually appeared in the trivia section of one of the books...or was it on my old Tumblr? Anyway, she was wearing a more princess-like dress there. This is specifically her outfit for when she's out piloting the Sun.

I don't remember when I came up with the idea of the Limbo Guy from Chapter 1 becoming the Pizza Guy. Maybe it was always his destiny.

On the other hand, there's really no reason at all for the Limbo Gals to become sunglasses-wearing pizza agents, except that I am myself. Listen, I watched Cardcaptor Sakura as a kid, and I saw Tomoyo's cool lady bodyguards, and the trajectory of my life was irrevocably changed.

This panel layout worked out pretty well, I think. If it were now, I probably would have made the starburst outline of panel 4 follow the silhouette of the sun a bit more closely to make the page feel more cohesively designed.

I remember a few people commenting on how silly it is for Glitchmaster to be calling the miraculous pizza rescue "expertly done." I guess legendary heroes are always doing this.

Anyway, that's the end of the interlude. To cap off this episode, I'd like to share these dreadful preliminary sketches of Hyper the Speedsword from the Q&A section:

Just horrible.

As with the last interlude, because this episode was shorter than usual, the next will be halfway through the month. See you then!