CQ Retrospective (Chapter 2 - Part 2)

 Welcome back! This one's going to be long!

The "Count Legato Arc" is one of the parts of CQ I get the most nostalgic for. I really had a ton of fun writing and drawing all of it. I'm not a true "theater person," but I have a lot of love and appreciation for the spectacle of theater, and I wanted to convey that here. Also, I like haunted house levels.

I mentioned this briefly in the last episode, but the black margins in this section, while adding a lot of atmosphere, made some of the divisions between panels pretty hard to read. I guess it would have helped here if I'd brightened up the room a bit.

These are two separate panels, but my first instinct when looking at this is that the close-up on Legato should have just been layered on top of the wider shot, with no panel break. With the black margins, it just looks weirdly cut off.

We later learn that Legato controls his servants with his contact lens, but I wanted it to come off like cartoonishly exaggerated anger here, with nothing more to it. I wonder if it did?

The music instrument ghosts were very fun. It was challenging to figure out a good place to put the flame on some of them. Also, only the best Extremely Non-Alcoholic Apple Cider for the count's guests.

I don't remember putting so much detail into that poster lettering. Legato is lucky to have me as his graphic designer.

It's very rare that I try to compose panels in such a way that the speech bubbles are read right to left at any point. I'm not entirely sure this was successful, but I didn't hear any complaints about it, so I win. 

As a very general comics tip, try to arrange your speech bubbles so that there's no possible way they can be read out of order. This isn't 100% realistic, I know, but just keep it in mind as a goal to shoot for.

Years ago, I cast a voice actor as Legato for a promotional video, and this was one of the lines used for the audition. I'm honored to have heard it read by a lot of people.

I had some reservations about this because I didn't really want "Carrot is crossdressing" to be the joke. I hope my intentions ultimately came across. Also, Almond's Sir Trumpet costume was one of my favorites to design in the chapter.

I wanted Cucumber to look like a dumpling.

If you didn't know, like I didn't before I wrote this, a concertina is an instrument similar to an accordion. I'm pretty sure I chose it because the paddles made a good substitute for Nautilus' hair ornaments. 

All the main cast are given "ear socks" to make them look like Melody Kingdom characters for the play. Maybe the ribbons are a little extra reinforcement for Nautilus'.

I didn't want this segment to feel any longer than it already did, but I do really like the feeling of Cucumber quietly wandering the empty halls of a big haunted manor in a bush costume, and I wish there could have been more of it.

I remember a few readers compared this to a similar scenario in Mother 3, and I guess I can't deny that it was an influence.

Thinking about Caboodle and Legato interacting for even a minute is great. I wish I'd had time to show this encounter in full. 

I know it was meant to be a punishment, but I wish I'd made Lute's tree costume a little cuter. At least it had the bird.

There was originally going to be a bit more introduction to this part. I think I planned to show the "lobby" where the villagers were forced to enter, but it wasn't really essential, so I cut it.

Theater critic Cucumber over here. In retrospect, I should have made it clearer that what he was saying was "you can't rhyme a word with itself."

This is all the designing I had to do for the music note dancer girls. 

I made a shirt with Prince Crescendo's "Beautiful Boy" banner as a Kickstarter reward. I considered also making this one a shirt as a joke alternative, but decided the potential for harm was not worth it.

I think this may have been around the time I decided to tone down Parfait's accent. 

I kind of adore Bacon in this outfit. I think I succeeded in making them look like a Sailor Moon villain.

It's not exactly subtle, I know. Like I said earlier, I didn't want there to be any ambiguity as to where the humor of this scene was supposed to come from.

I think this little drawing of Bacon is cute. I wish I'd made it a bit more visible.

It's unclear why Peridot has an identical costume just ready to go, but she also looks good in it. 

I added a few motion lines in the book to indicate that the sword was flopping over. In retrospect, I wonder if my very first attempt at this page would have been clearer:

Maybe.

This is the sequence that stands out in my mind most clearly when I think about how the black margins made panel divisions hard to read. It looks a bit like Almond's hat is hovering above her head rather than falling on the floor. 

For comparison, here it is with white margins.

Peridot's reaction here is a hint at something we still haven't gotten to almost 600 pages later, just in case you wanted another example of why I say "don't do webcomics."

I didn't really think too much about how long Liquus was going to be out of commission at this point. He was kind of sacrificed for the sake of Nautilus getting to freak out at Legato once. I'd do it again.

I think it's a bit of a shame that this is the only "moment of clarity" Nautilus has... Well, that's not exactly true, but I guess what I'm saying is I wish she yelled at people a little more.

I really like the colors on this page.

Sorry to harp on this, but I'm realizing now that I should have leaned into the ambiguity of panel divisions in this section. The last two panels here feel like just one panel with the close-up of Legato superimposed over Lute and the rest, and I think it would have read just fine if I'd intended it that way.

Well, goodbye, black margins. We had fun.

I debated for a while on whether to name him Panpipe or Panflute, but I decided to go for the alliteration. Also, I totally forgot Lute's bird became permanent here, implying it wasn't part of Legato's magic. It just flew in through the window and got comfy.

This scene was going to be longer, with a full flashback of Mandolin bullying Panpipe, but I didn't really think it was necessary.

By the way, this might be the first drawing I did of Mandolin.

That bird went on to become Mandolin's stepparent.

Hey, it's the Tumblr post.

Nautilus is a forgiving person at heart, but I'm not fully convinced she hasn't forgotten about this promise. Heck, I forgot about it.

I do feel like the resolution to this arc was a bit too hasty, looking back. Count Legato was a long diversion from the main plot, which was the "point," but by the end, I was eager to wrap it up and get to Noisemaster as quickly as possible.

I also regret the pronoun choice here, but I still like these panels.

This is kind of an abrupt transition. I think that if I were planning this chapter now, I might put the meeting between Noisemaster and the Nightmare Knight here, as the heroes are finally making their way to Rhythm Ridge. I do love this page, though.

By this point, I was a bit more conscious of the effects of CMYK conversion for print, so my color choices were a little more carefully considered, but there were still some problem areas. Chardonnay's lime green, for example.

This was the last time I could get away with a dramatic upshot of Noisemaster before revealing he was two feet tall.

This and the previous panel might be a good example of the difference between Noisemaster's usual and "serious" color palettes...if it actually felt consistent. Or, uh, intentional. I was just kind of bouncing around whatever color scheme was the most fun on each page. I don't regret it, but I'd be smarter about it now.

See, now it's green all of a sudden, and that hot pink from the previous few pages has become purplish. (I think the hot pink would have worked here too, though.)

I really enjoyed treating Noisemaster's faceplate as a reflective surface, but this is another thing I wasn't always consistent about. 

Noisemaster was originally going to give each of the heroes an intro. In the end, I decided it felt too redundant coming after the whole Prince Crescendo thing, but it's cute to think about.

Noisemaster's height had already been shown by comparison to the Nightmare Knight, but it didn't really register for most people how short he was until this panel. I vaguely remember saying he was the approximate size of a housecat in response to a reader question.

I'm not sure why Carrot's cape is so transparent here when Noisemaster's is fully opaque.

The first point where Noisemaster's colors really mellow out.

I love this page, so I'm posting the whole thing! I don't think it's as visually impressive "as a whole" as some pages I've posted in their entirety, but it was pretty ambitious, which I like.

I know I've pointed out "meta" lighting before, but I think panel 1 might be the only instance of a speech bubble as a light source, which is fun. Panel 3's graphic style is pretty unique for this chapter, and I remember thinking "ah, I wish I'd done more like this earlier" after I finished it. The last two panels, while great in terms of mood, are unfortunately low-contrast, and I worry now that the blue-on-purple speech bubbles might be tough to read for some.

It's Mutemaster! The major points of Mutemaster's visual style are soft, chalky edges and desaturated blue-greens. Fed up with the experience of printing a book, I had this really stupid idea initially of Mutemaster being "the CMYK to Noisemaster's RGB."

Noisemaster's color scheme is meant to shift to accommodate Mutemaster's here, but in reality that just means there's a lot more blue on the following pages.

It's been established at this point that the Disaster Masters and Nightmare Knight share what is basically a familial bond, but there was a point before all that was determined where I considered making Noise and Mute's relationship something closer to romance.

This is a strange effect... The shadows on the left side here are supposed to be in line with Mutemaster's style, while the lit portions conform to Noisemaster's style. Even if it wasn't totally successful, in my opinion, I do like the idea.

Mutemaster's shift from harmless to hostile is brought on by loud noise from any source other than Noisemaster, which...kind of suggests that he's a pacifist at heart, doesn't it? In truth, he might be the easiest to convince to give up the villain's life, if he weren't so committed to making Noisemaster happy.

He's meant to look grayer here, but that's still technically blue.

He's only ever truly gray when he's doing this. Nautilus' speech bubble dissolving within the Mute Zone was an idea I only came up with during this scene, regrettably. 

By the way, here's a page of sketches I did to plan out this fight scene. I didn't end up following all these notes... (Mutemaster's angry eyes ended up looking pretty much the same as the Nightmare Knight's, after all.) I do really like the idea of Mutemaster leaving monochrome footprints as he walks, though.

I had a really clear picture of this part in my mind from the start of the chapter. Looking at it now, though, it's unfortunate that Piano's hair is the same color as the floor in the previous panel--it looks like it's bleeding over.

Noisemaster's faceplate shattering and displaying static was something I looked forward to for a while. Maybe it's predictable, but sometimes predictable things are good.

Noisemaster's monologue here was a late addition. Originally, he was just going to be like "Too late now, hahaha, seeya Trebleopolis!" but I wanted to reveal more of his heart.

I remember posting something like "Good news, everybody! The blimp clown was still alive after all! But NOT FOR LONG"

The purple star aesthetic is supposed to make it obvious who created this shield, but I think it might have been good to make the visual style less "Noisemaster" on this page, too.

His aesthetic kind of falls away here, anyway.

The Count Legato arc really impacted my approach to lighting, I think. This is such a long way from the Oracle's first appearance.

These characters are very stupid in this scene, I know. Bad writing is fine in moderation. (This is not true.)

This is meant to be Cucumber's big "turning point." There were some who speculated that Cucumber would defect to the villains' side after this, which I admit would make for a pretty juicy AU.

It's the source code of the website. Obviously, this needed to be changed for the book, so it was replaced with a page from the script (namely, the upcoming scene where Glitchmaster ambushes the heroes). Also, I have to say, that "pixel" Noisemaster is not great. Ya boy has looked better.

That's it for Chapter 2! Next time: the interlude!