Pearly Gates Part One, or, "Wait, how many pages?" (Patreon)

My assistant messaged me: "so ive got a comic idea". It was like, 2014. Gravity Falls was king, but we had a lot of affection still for Steven Universe. We were only just now living in a post-Lapis world, and Pearl was EVERYONE'S top waifu.

I was balls deep in commissions and bad at time management. "Sure, let's party."

"ok, so. here's the concept. pearl's grossed out by humans but what if she was also fascinated by them. she thinks theyre gnarly but also kinda hot. she's also like, tiny?? anyway what if she rode greg's hog."

AND SO IT BEGAN.

Pearly Gates's whole script is roughly 9 pages long and I'm still not sure how nine turned into 60-something. It was completed in a week and contains such gems as " (Panel of Steven in a book store, trenchcoat, fedora, and sunglasses, shoving a twenty towards a cashier.) ", "(Pearl leans down and licks at the head of #COOLDICK2014.)", "(Greg looks down at his NIFTY, YET SOFT WEINER, THEN UP AT PEARL. HIS FACE IS A MIXTURE OF DEEP SHAME AND UTTER TERROR)"

Immediately after the script was done I started thumbing the pages... I'd always wanted to do a comic, and a few friends had recently dived into the world of doujins. This seemed like a great idea to test out composition, and I had my assistant dig up all their favorite doujins so I could study paneling and posing.

A lot of the script is dialog and joke heavy, and the rest is trying to focus on charm points of Pearl (that are a little innaccurate now, but still cute to imagine...) like her over-describing kisses to the point that it's grotesque, being too aggressive with a soft human, or diving into books to figure out optimal BJ strategies. Just drawing her cute form is fine, but it feels extremely empty if I'm not honing in on her personality.

If the script was rewritten today (and it is gonna be slightly rewritten during final word ballooning, tbh...) the scenario would probably change more. Pearl's resentment of Greg ran way deeper than we had both assumed, and coupled with her disgust with humans... It's being adjusted more to reflect her trying to get close to Rose again by trying to understand (poorly) how humans beguiled her so much.

I'm still quite proud of the work on it, though! Even though some plot ideas don't mesh as well with what we know now, it's still a fun, tight script.

Included in today's update is the (extremely) rough draft for the first half of the comic in a bigass sai file. Decipher it like hieroglyphics. Also included are a few pngs of the first 5 pages if you don't want to fuck with sai, as well as the (less extremely) rough first draft of the script.

I should mention one of my top goals with this comic was to make great reaction images people could crop and use. I hope I succeeded.

Finally, something I wanted to mention. I will sell the comic separately from the patreon but include it for a cheaper pledge-price through here, but in addition to the comic you'll get access to extra concept art, the rough thumbs, the script, and a bonus comic.

Stay tuned for next time, where I'll talk about the process of interpreting a script to art, and also some talk about the minicomic... LOGDATE 69!