Annotated 1-1
First four-page scene! This one is largely Phil with my edits, so I feel a little bad critiquing it, but there are a lot of pros and cons on display.
The good: Guilded Age wastes absolutely no time telling the reader what kind of comic it’s going to be. Sure, we had ambitions to talk about the nature of reality and personal growth and all that deep stuff, but you gotta build to that. Exotic locations, exotic monsters, exotic religions, snark: if you were the kind of reader we wanted, this had a good chance of hooking you. Plus, Erica, Phil, and I had done a lot of pre-work designing the six main characters in this opening chapter, so we were able to send them roaring out of the gate with a lot of confidence. Frigg’s first bit of trolling is on point. Readers did eventually have some trouble with the amount of flashbacks and flashforwards we threw at them in the early chapters, but it was the right decision to show this scene first.
However, even after all the prep work we did, there were some things we only figured out about each character after we worked with them for a bit. The last panel is the first and last time that you’ll see Gravedust treat another race so dismissively, the first and last time Syr’Nj will talk about Byron as if he’s just some meathead, and the first and last time Gravedust will refer to a Christian-like idea of Hell.
Was going to say that both Syr’Nj and Gravy seem a little out of character. But then, what is character without development? Gravy seems to be more sharp and Frigg-like than — pardon the expression — dry, while Syr’Nj is wasting time with sarcasm; she’s often sarcastic while doing something, but doesn’t stop acting just to snark.
Thank you for this closer examination.
Oh yes, quite admittedly a lot of this early time was spent still feeling out who they were, especially when trying to contrast the cold open adventures with their origin story in progress.
Was the five-man party akin to WoW’s dungeon groups (I’m sure it’s not unique to that) intentional or coincidental?
I’m not sure if I’m more puzzled by the counting or by calling Frigg, Syr’nj, and Bandit men.
Very intentional.
Heyyyyyy… It’s E-merl’s hat! Hello little hat!
Yes, that’s apparently the icon Samantha gave for T way back in the day! Mine is Scipio’s cigar.
Huh? Where?
Above the annotations.
Nice. I never noticed you guys signed them!
Ooo, sick burn, Sassdust Desertsasser! ;)
I never really saw this as Gravedust being dismissive of another species, merely describing the priest based on a combination of appearance and personal propensity to bark instead of bite. To be dismissive of the species he’d have to give the impression that he was mocking him for being one of the fuzzy peoples rather than mocking him for monologing instead of obliterating the intruders like he claims to be able to.
This page really takes me back since I was still doing the lettering in a Mac app called Comic Life. It made word ballooning super easy, but I ended up not enjoying how hard it was to manage the margins of the contents of these balloons, as well as the weird triangular sort of trails between them. I don’t think it was designed with my Bendis-like balloon stacking in mind.
But I would letter the comic in there, then cover the comic art with a green layer, save & export, then lay over my balloons with the green keyed out over the original comic art in photoshop. Sometimes I would do this to a penciled version of the comic so it would be ready to slap on after Erica finished.
I think for all the steps I *may* had saved myself in the lettering process, I really wound up just creating more work of a different variety. OH WELL.
That said, even after I gave up on Comic Life and started doing everything in photoshop again, it still had its uses to me. To the very end, I used its specially shaped balloons copy/pasted into photoshop (not illustrator, because I am a fucking dinosaur when it comes to lettering). It was always difficult for me to make any new shapes, so having those templates on hand was pretty fucking useful.
>Flashes back to when I used to do my lettering in the fucking GIMP for older projects
Seems strange to have a Gnoll as the first Tectonite, given how integral Tectonicus became to the Trolls. It’s not as if he doesn’t welcome other races, and the Gnolls are in the same faction, but had you already developed the Troll links to Tectonicus by this point, or was that still to be thought of?
You know, I really liked the art in the earlier comics, I think my appreciation for the comic suffered a little when the original artist left.
Just remember Dusty: Hell is what you make of it.