The Far Side of Utopia

In these rambling sections I call comic-tary there are things some people like and things people don’t – sometimes they are same thing for different groups of people. In particular one that’s split opinions is how-the-sausage is made commentary; some people are really interested in how things come to be, and some people prefer to believe that the webcomic in it’s entirely existed since the beginning of time as a crystallized concept that is being slowly unearthed 😛

I mention this as forewarning to that I will reference comic-sausage-making in two ways today, so you’ve been warned!

Comic World Commentary!

For starters this page was originally in the outline, but I cut it in order to swap to Miko (… that’s not a spoiler, you gotta know we are going to see what’s up over there at some point!); I decided however I wanted to get further here since it’ll take some time before we swap back and I didn’t want to jump cut out much, and I prefer to make it seem as though some time has passed when I cut away and cut back, rather then pure time stops. Adding it back in after I’d accounted for it being cut was a little challenging, because it means I had to write more fluff dialog then usual – fluff dialog is where you get to know more about characters, get to make funny comments, get know the world… but it’s also harder for me write.

Second, I know that some people will assume that cause I used tennis as an example the IDS world (where we presume Peter and Kally are from) is our world – no knowledge of magic -> has tennis -> real world!… I’ve seen this logic train before. But I’ll forewarn you once more, I don’t involve our world as such in the comic. I would imagine, however, that the IDS world who had sports and stuff before magic has sports far more similar to ours. Ultimately I picked tennis as it’s useful short hand for explaining things without having blocks of text that resemble these stuffed into the comic tell you things 90% of you already know… though since the sport in question is not-actually-very similar to tennis (the aforementioned simplified and with magic parts being equally relevant to that equation),  we’ll see how much ground I actually made!

As to how the sport in question came to be, it existed as an idea long before this plot line, to be honest. One of those world details that was planned to come up but got shuffled away. There were drafts where we spent far longer at Levenworth then we have so far.

General Update:

There is a new vote incentive, if you haven’t seen it since it went up yesterday, of course. You can see it here! It’s my first try at digital painting in a while. What’s the difference between digital painting and what I usually do? It takes a lot longer and produces worse results! 😉 Still – I think it’s fun to try and probably good for learning things.

Wrist Update:

I talked to the doctor on my wrist. It went well I guess. List of things the doctor says I can do as much as I want: eat , run , do things with my right shoulder, draw , anything. Ultimately he pretty much just said “That thing you do too much of? Do less of that thing.” like always, which I’m taking as a good sign. I will try to draw in more moderation. My track record on this is really bad, but I’ll learn maybe.

It’s a little frustrating just because there are so many hours of drawing between me and being better at drawing. I guess I learned how ‘level stats’ from RPGs – do thing over and over till you get better; if you want to level faster, do thing more! Unfortunately I’m not an RPG Character… 😛