Knife Flora and Knife Fauna (Patreon)

A bunch of new sketches (while I'm experiencing post-Montenegro mental clarity and creative high) - mostly exploring the smaller inhabitants of our world (as we did for Vol I 4 years ago).

Animals, plants, foods, drinks. An approach like this (taking such a huge time frame to develop a book's feel, its je-ne-sais-quoi rather than just churning out page after page after page) is balancing between being thorough and being unreasonable, so why am I doing this?

The other day I was reading a Comicbook from a Writer I Don't Really Care For and an Artists I Really Really Love. A fantasy epic with seemingly big scope and creative ambition that ended up looking like absolutely nothing to me - just another floppy issue of something that I Guess Looks Nice.

Thinking about the book after finishing a couple of issues, I genuinely couldn't figure out whether the Writer is actually incapable of writing anything other than his traditional "rednecks with daddy issues going on their big sad adventure" fair with the most thin patina of "wordlbuilding" (the worldbuilding inevitably just being "random fantasy furries"), or is it actually the ONLY kind of fantasy/sci-fi American reader WANTS? Because I sure as hell want none of this stuff, and no amount of My Favorite Artists can salvage my interest for it for more than a few issues. There's just no space for him to stretch, to breathe, to flex any muscles other than what you usually get on anthology level (few very independently impressive designs & vistas) and one's natural gift for sequentials. That book's world has no architecture, no clothes, no flora or fauna, only estimations of all these things. Think "fantasy temple", think "fantasy creature", think "fantasy villain". Type all these prompts into your script. What wasn't made by AI but starting to feel like is was made by AI?

And I really don't want to be so mean to this book, or to the Artist I Really Really Love, but I can't help imagining myself opening a script that says "Page 1, panel 1. Pa Kent-style American farm; redneck bird people are doing their evening prayer. Father is very controlling" - and I want to completely retire from the hemisphere of comics for another 3 year.

So yeah, I think animals, plants, foods, drinks are important.

Take a look at this page of pencils. 

Looping back to time frames again, I think I've been avoiding drawing this scene for almost a year, passively gathering ideas and references, being intimidated by my own ambitions and ruminating on how exactly an establishing scene for a city like ours should flow... And yes, a year of ruminating on anything is something that would've been impossible even during our most relaxed early stages of Protector/First Knife, not to mention a more serious comics publication (like the one by that Writer and the Artist I Love) - but I think being allowed to give so much time and thought to things that usually suffer the most in monthly publications is crucial to me personally right now. 

But what do you guys think? 

(Also, which version do you think works best?)

Also, some housekeeping:

Collections of post chronicling development of both volumes of First Knife are now available! It's a pretty nice new Patreon feature, and I think browsing collections is way more pleasant than browsing half-defunct hashtags. So if you want to refresh any of the previous FKII posts in your memory - it's never been easier!