Page Commentary No. 120 (Patreon)

Gunwild: So, I feel the need to admit that the line "If you're not cheating, you're not trying!" is 100% stolen from Adam Warren's Gen13 run in the early 2000s. It was the reason I got into buying monthly comics at the time I did. Adam Warren is the writer/artist behind our fellow Hiveworks comic Empowered, which you can read for free.

Psu: And is also a pretty cool guy. I showed him Cassiopeia a few times! Anyway... looking at this page this is CRAZY ambitious. What the hell were we thinking? Or what was I thinking? What was the set directions we had in the script? Whose bright idea was setting this in a ruined city?

Gunwild: I think my idea was to have it on like an easy-to-draw high-tech track to keep things going, and you were like "But a ruined city is so much cooler and more outlaw-y!"

Psu: It REALLY is much more outlaw-y. I know I enjoyed coming up with little background details about the place that never get brought up in the story telling. They don't show up here but in a later page you'll see slips of paper with "evacuation notices" on them. I figure we'll talk about that again when we get there but I think this was when I really went and tried to make these pages as cool as possible. So they just drive through a collapsed section of stadium and onto the abandoned highway!

Gunwild: And then later into ruined buildings. Originally they were going to be condemned buildings. But we'll get to that. Fun rifle grab though, huh?

Psu: Yeah, that was a bit in the script that I thought was both "really cool" and "I have no idea how I'm going to do that." And sometimes when you get hit with that kind of challenge you get some of your best work. That this page is still legible at all is great. I have some thoughts too on how we manage to use both Show and Tell to get a lot of things done on a page. You can see the top panel is just a long distance shot of the setting, but I knew I could rely on Gunwild's text to handle the exact narrative by narrating the positions of the racers. Thankfully we had race announcers who could help the story along by giving color commentary. Even if Kamsi and Vern are likely to go on their own tangents. BUT we didn't want to have them talking over the rifle retrieval because it's supposed to be something the officials can't really see and it's just too cool not to  draw it in action.

Gunwild: Next Page: will Cassiopeia's elbow survive?!