Page Commentary No. 145 (Patreon)

Gunwild: I hate red leaves, they mean it's gettin' cold! So evil.

Psu: Oh you’re gonna hate me for admitting this to our audience but I TOTALLY forgot about the Red Leaf Mercenary thing. Like when was the actual last time we talked about that as a plot point?

Gunwild: Uhh, for this page. It's fine, it'll just be back when Salt shows up, it's his 'in' for getting involved again. I mean assuming he can buy some fresh "krakenship" arms...

Psu: You can’t just get those at the local Space Stop and Shop. But I bet he could add it to the expenses. Contract work is tricky like that! It’s always a good idea to budget for complications.

Gunwild: I guess when you're planning to use the equipment you factor in the risk of incurring replacement costs... that Damascus steel knife is a pretty sweet piece of gear, though. We know most Vanaa don't carry edged weapons because they're not really familiar (or useful) in their culture, but Salt is an outsider like that.

Psu: It’s important to keep reminding people, that he KNOWS his ship looks like a skull! And I think Salt likes the idea of having a “boning knife.” This page is a very... “meanwhile at the villain’s lair” kinda moment you get out of cartoons. We don’t have too many cutaways to the evil team but we do use it now and then to just... drip feed information to the reader. These days I’m not too sure how I feel about it. I think I would rather avoid that sorta... “Here’s some secret information that the main characters don’t know” but it’s still useful on occasion.

Gunwild: We've had that "There's a bomb under the table the audience can see, but the characters don't know about!" talk between us a bunch of times. You know, where we argue like, "It's better if one of them knows and keeps trying to find an excuse to leave!" or "No, neither of them should know, but we also don't know what the timer is set to!" or whatever. Not exactly that, but similar concepts, I mean. Personally I think you're crushing it if the audience can know almost everything that's going on, but still aren't sure what'll happen next.

Psu: Ah that’s a good point. I think what I’m worried about is intentionally obfuscating in a way that feels too forced. To put it in the context of the current pages, we just had that page where Maddy reaches the balcony of the party at Kreuz’s club. And she’s looking at someone that we’ve hidden from the reader. We figured we could get away with hiding who it was and without really cheating the reader. If the reader feels some suspense, then it might’ve been worth it!

Gunwild: I admit... I think there are a lot of modern comics where you can go 20 pages with no surprises, twists, reveals, unexpected developments. Let's just keep trying not to let that happen.

Psu: It’s a balancing act! if we treat everything like it’s supposed to be a surprise, how can the reader get any firm footing on the story? This seems to be just a tangent on story telling in general... What about this page though? There are a lot of skulls on it, relative to other Cassiopeia pages.

Gunwild: Nah. When you think about it, everyone's head has a skull inside of it all the time.

Psu: Not that Salt guy... At least... not most of the time.