Page Commentary No. 249 (Patreon)

Gunwild: I admit, I love talking cute heads in floating circles.

Psu: It is a cool page.

Gunwild: Although looking at it now, I'd take out the quotation marks since they're word balloons and not normal captions. Oh, well!

Psu: Visually the balloons were pretty important. Because we don't have little superhero icons to indicate which character is talking off page. I'm better at drawing little chibis. But there's so much going on, we needed to take a lot of little measures to fit it all in. Strategically, might not be very realistic but I don't think either of us were interested in writing a 24 hour siege story.

Gunwild: That kinda siegey action story is cool and all, but it would be tough to tell an extended story of that type here, given the way imagery would repeat and the pace this particular chapter has been running at.

Psu: I do like a good siege movie. The Two Towers. Assault on Precinct 13. But then, Maddy's instincts are proven right here and the facility was about to burn itself up! So it's a good thing we have her coming in to the rescue, and she at this point has a lot of pull with the other Regency captains and local ships in the.... what is this the Ghoul Stars system?

Gunwild: No, it's just stated as being "dark space" between inhabited systems, so we can say it's anywhere it needs to be for her to show up! And as always, space travel happens at the speed of plot.

Psu: And ships travel faster than the speed of light, so if she just like... hits up a bunch of captains on a zoom call she can get there in a moments notice. Although it's also true we didn't specify exactly how much time happened between this page and the previous one. Considering they managed to lose the security forces and worked to stabilize Zeke, it could've been quite a while.

Gunwild: The time that passes in-story between page turns and panels are are not what you'd call 'universal constants' that we can always quantify, like we try to do with time and distance in the real world. Controlling the pace at which a reader has the story hit them can be a fool's errand! But I think doing our best to keep from unintentionally throwing them is a big help.

Psu: Yeah, the big thing is being able to follow the logic between panels. Like... I dunno, I've seen some comics go "here is Krypton" and "it exploded" in two panels and as long as you can follow the logic, the time in between these moments is kinda ephemeral and possibly unimportant. What we wanted was to get to a pretty cool action beat with everyone's favorite character coming to the "rescue."

Gunwild: Theira is about to totally wow people with amazing aim, just like Johnny Utah in Point Break, and is even acting like him. This is an important observation.

Psu: Heh, we definitely gotta talk about the Theira maneuver in the next page or so. It's probably the second best gag in the entire chapter. Anyway, hey Brell, wanna talk about the lighting on this page? It's kinda flat, which is my fault. There are three different sets in here and they're just interchangeable dark command room type sets.

Brellom: I feel like this is a page you did most of the work on, based on how the rendering is handled. I'm certainly not big on the grey-ish colour schemes in the last two pages, but stuff like that happens. It can fit the rather grim tone of the scene, with having just recently nearly lost Zeke. Our characters are kind of in a dark emotional space now, and we're not really sure what's going to happen yet. I'm sure we'd probably do something better now though, retrospect. But it's always easier to be the Monday morning quarterback. That said, it's probably a good buildup to some of my most favourite pages in the entire comic -- and among the most dramatically lit pages. It almost feels like that part in the hero's journey where the heroes are at their lowest right before their apotheosis, culminating in a really dynamic and satisfying final fight.

Gunwild: The hero in Brellom's books being Dr. Botz!

Brellom: Naturally.

Psu: I was gonna say Cupcake. Also the masked stranger to the right of Theira, whose face we don't see this entire chapter.

Brellom: Remember that, folks. They're gonna be important later on.

Gunwild: It's probably Wolverine, he shows up in like every comic.

Psu: Oh wait... I gotta include a complaint I just thought of. I should've designed the ships in the background of the last panel as different than Regency standard ship design. The whole design language of Regency ships are long ships with white and blue color schemes, and the glowing blue circle on the side of it. If we really wanted to say that the ships weren't all necessarily Regency, that would've been one way to do it. Ah well... I was too busy figuring out what a cracked dark planet looks like from low orbit.

Gunwild: The answer is "pretty spooky!"

Psu: Perfect place to put a hide out. But it could use a swimming pool. Or a jacuzzi.