Page Commentary No. 237 (Patreon)

Psu: This page keeps going in my art portfolios, cause it's a really cool one. We don't have enough of those in this comic, it feels like. But I think if we just kept putting our characters in life or death situations, every other story, then it'd lose a lot of meaning.

Gunwild: Ehh I don't have a lot of philosophy to drop, here. I always enjoy onscreen violence in comics being a few really well-defined images without stopping for words, so that worked out great.

Psu: We sometimes complain as readers when a character isn't shown, doing the thing that they're good at. So Minx getting the chance to make short work of some pretender bots was good. Though... maybe we're getting into that sort of thing where the story is making the threatening copies, less powerful, the more of them that we throw at the heroes.

Gunwild: Ah yeah, like how one ninja trying to kill you is bad because they're probably super cool and dangerous, but a dozen is probably just a minor inconvenience in terms of the story because they're probably henchmen. I tend to think the way to raise stakes like that isn't always threatening to kill a character, but to make them fail in some goal.

Psu: All the same, I'm glad that we have our heroes running from the baddies here. They need to get somewhere with their friends so they can work together! Plus it's kinda cute how Minx has to pick up Cassiopeia.

Gunwild: Uh, good trigger discipline in Panel 4?

Psu: Oh I still have a lot of comments to make, patting ourselves on the back for some subtle details. Like, in the third panel we show Cassiopeia's blaster going through the back of a drone's head just fine. But in the last panel, the Drone's shields are deflecting it. We don't explicitly spell out in words what's going on, but I think it's okay to infer from this that Minx's physical swords cut through the Drone and disrupted it's shields letting Cassiopeia shoot through it right after. There's a lot of visuals I loved developing on this page, too. Like... our comic doesn't really do action lines very often. Despite being inspired by manga, I tend to avoid using comic book illustration shorthands like motion lines and stuff. UNLESS I can somehow recreate those things using stuff inside the comic universe. Like here, to get the dynamic big bold lines I wanted to emphasize depth in the scene, I choose a big bright window all across a simple hallway.

Psu: For me, this was specifically a callback to this one scene in Terminator 2. Specifically it's the hallway scene where Sarah Connor first sees the T-1000. The lighting in that scene really stuck out in my mind as a kid.

Brellom: This page has a striking, cinematic quality to it with how the shots are composed within the environment. But I'm actually not a big fan of this page. It's an infamous page for me!

Gunwild: Then how come I don't know what you're talking about? Checkmate.

Psu: Oh hey, brellom's here now. They helped a lot on this one.

Brellom: Did we rush to get this one out or something?

Psu: Probably. I was going nuts those days.

Brellom: I think I took a cheap & easy way of lighting this scene, using an "Add (Glow)" layer, or something... So I didn't have control over the colours like in the other pages. And it's a bit rough around the edges... I had always planned for the lighting on Peia's face in the bottom half of the page to be smoothed out... Motor Minx's helmet is cool though.

Psu: Mmm... I actually didn't mess with your rendering a lot. I was pretty happy with the sharp edges. I think if anything, maybe I could have blended the light on Cassiopeia's face in panel 4 some more. But I think the sharpness adds to the scene in some ways. I know, after you sent me some of the renderings, I went back and adjusted the lighting. In particular, the way the hallway fades off in the distance, is one of my favorite bits of lighting in the entire comic.

Brellom: Panel 4 is pretty much the main thing that gets me... but yeah that final shot with the hallway is super cool.

Psu: This comic is super cool.

Gunwild: They don't pay the people who make it enough!

Psu: But I think I was just happy to have Minx get another cool action scene. We need more of those!

Brellom: Petition for Motor Minx centric comic series when?

Psu: Well... I won't say never. But first I have to stop going nuts trying to get pages out.

Brellom: Spend 2 minutes max on each page. That'll let you get them done faster.