Page Commentary No. 114 (Patreon)

Gunwild: Second commentary thing this week to make up for the Thanksgiving break.

Psu: Hey it's the Shadowbroker!

Gunwild: It is not a dissimilar role... but ya know, crime bosses are a thing! Why wouldn't they be even in the space-future? Also the Old Salt is adorable, I know he's a murderer. But he is.

Psu: I really tried to make him look as threatening as possible! I guess we haven't discussed his character design yet. The main takeaways are that he needed some more sharp points and asymmetry. It makes him look less friendly. He's not disturbing in the same way we'd see the Vanaa elders later, but he's still decidedly more aggressive than the other Vanaa we see. Even Kwah!

Gunwild: Plus he has a black hat, which according to Western screen tradition is the mark of evil.

Psu: Hah, I can't remember if you specified that in the script. Cowboy hats constantly give me trouble when I'm drawing them. I got okay at drawing one type of hat, which means that every character with a Cowboy hat must get them from the same place Zeke does. Still... this page is full of lots of fun designs. I had to come up with a few bounty hunters. I had to make up the stadium for the race. I got to put a little bandolier inside Old Salt. I had to draw some evil shelves.

Gunwild: It does a lot design-wise, and sets up this whole thing fairly well... yeah it's kinda exposity, but at least it gets it out of the way. I do like when shows do mysterious tags before the episode proper begins. I think Star Trek and Stargate and Babylon 5 did that every ep. You'd rarely get a cold open that wasn't just announcing the main conflict for the episode.

Psu: I'm hoping our patreons have already read this chapter already, we don't usually do that thing where we cut to the middle of a conversation and cut away before we explain everything. There were a lot of good things this page did though, in terms of all that exposition. But we try not to cheat TOO much by skipping the parts of the conversation where they must be discussing Captain Vrax.

Gunwild: We're sneaky!