The Red Muscle Chapter 3 WIP 5 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I've got another set of Red Muscle pages here for you all.

This set of pages also has a good amount of changes from the old chapter. I wanted to use the gym room from chapter 6 more since I designed the general layout and felt like it would be good to use more. It felt more like a proper work day for them to go in there. The more important change, and maybe the part of this entire chapter I'm most satisfied with, is the way the conversation plays out between Scarlet and Edgar as they start checking the suit.

Edgar came off as very obsessive with the suit in a really tropey and corny way before, really lost in the details like the way otaku are portrayed to start droning on about their interests without paying attention to any social cues. I think what I want out of Scarlet and Edgar's dynamic is to have Scarlet be the one that's a bit more obsessive and Edgar is really trying to turn off his emotions and be professional when it comes to working on his projects. He pulls at the suit to check on the quality of his work and sort of shuts off the fact that he's getting deep into Scarlet's personal space in a way she's a bit too aware of. We saw before that Edgar is aware of her as a potential partner and in this instance we can see that Scarlet is aware of him and the potential of physical interaction which she's not against but it makes her jumpy and excitable so she reacts strongly to her butt getting touched while she can't see. I really wanted to make it a point that Scarlet was ok with their physicality as opposed to her pure embarrassment before.

The guppies showing up is a bit different too. I never thought the laser idea worked too well and maybe didn't make that much sense for Edgar who actually does order a lot of things and probably has to interact with lots of deliveries and random people popping into his property. I took the time to improve the fight between Scarlet and the guppies, but the actual action will be on the next page that I didn't post here. I think giving that little bit of levity with the guppies doing their thing helps keep the scene entertaining.

We're almost at the end of the chapter! The next update will have the last 4 pages and hopefully it won't be too much longer before I can share the final chapter with completed inks and color. I've already started chipping away at it and I'm currently on page 8, and I think most of the time consuming pages have been cleared already so I'm hoping to pick up the pace a bit.

I don't remember if I mentioned it anywhere but I've been stewing on the idea of making youtube vids in the wake of social media sort of decentralizing. I want to use them as an excuse to get myself to do a lot of the projects I've been writing down in my notes for months/years but always left alone. A lot of my ideas are for things I haven't practiced or studied but I think as I've snapped out of the endless scrolling fugue state, I want to push myself to be more creative and tackle the challenges that I avoid because of how uncomfortable it is to draw and study things you just don't know how to do. I'm going to start my channel with maybe an intro video to talk about my influences and maybe a video trying to encompass my way of thinking about comics into one cohesive place. Everything after those videos would be trying to go through the process of working on a vis dev idea from beginning to end, like for example I want to develop the visual language for a game idea that I had. Some other ideas would be to try my hand again at making clay figures and make them look as professional as possible with the knowledge I've picked up so far (which I wrote about on my cohost page here).

That's sort of where I'm at at the moment, lots to do and I'm trying to get myself to get through the ideas and make the time in my daily life for them. I might try to sneak in a patreon character poll for this month too, since I want to give the patrons something they can participate in more. I'll try to make a list of some characters I want to draw and post a poll some time soon, so I'll see you all next post!