(Deprecated Version) Page 1 (Patreon)

This one is gonna be available to the public (after the official comic launch date, of course).  In the future, however, posts like this will be limited to Patrons only, simply because I'm embarrassed to show them to EVERYONE on the Internet.  Just this once, I wanted to post an example to show to everyone that comes to visit what they might expect from a Patron-only post.

I think I've mentioned before, drawing a webcomic is a balancing act of speed and quality.  This version of the page failed at both.  It took me forever to color, and didn't look very good when it was done.  I was unsure even how I wanted a finished page to look, so I started playing around with different styles for color, shading... I knew it needed to be dirty and grungy, so I used a lot of greys and greens and browns, but the whole thing wound up being just a touch too light to nail the theme I was craving.  When I first envisioned this world, I was under the influence of both depression and Lovecraft, so I knew it had to be a world that was just utterly miserable.  A fallen landscape, destroyed and ravaged, where the survivors were only barely staying alive by eating rats and the trash left behind from a more prosperous age.  This color scheme wound up being way too bright for that.

Then there was the challenge of trying to make it look lived in.  Characters take me the longest so I was trying to find a way to create a populated area without having to spend countless hours drawing a dozen unimportant characters on every panel.  (I might STILL be trying to work on a way to do that, tbh)  The perspective on those buildings is all wrong, the borders are misaligned and... actually... apart from that awkward grey bar in the middle... where even are the borders?  Aside from all that, Kiva's narration just wasn't a very good introduction to this story any more, which had continued evolving out from under the original dialogue on the sketch, and it left off in an awkward spot because I had expected page 2 to be immediately available, as if you were reading a book, instead of it being a periodical webcomic with a week's delay between them.

Perhaps the worst sin of all, I had chosen Comic Sans for the font.  My reasoning was that it is never more appropriate to use Comic Sans than when you're making an actual comic, but it turns out... it's just never appropriate to use Comic Sans.

As a result, I redid this page from scratch.  I redid it a few times, actually.  I wanted the introduction to God Slayers to be a real solid foundation for something new and interesting and good.  I hope I succeeded.