Comic for Monday, January 18th
I will point out we have seen Mione with her eyes open before, several times. Even as far back as her first appearance. God damn the art used to be awful. That doesn’t count as whining about art! That’s whining about past events! That’s fair game! 😛
I don’t think Ila is patient enough to watch other people play. I also think she’s going to get spoiled at this rate. It’s worth noting that Arkady probably has a fairly good idea Ila is not your typically kid, even if there is no way he could know what she is; this is probably part of the reason he apparently volunteered to play against her.
Reading the page I guess it’s maybe not clear all the thought bubbles are Peter’s. They are. I will think on how to make that more clear at some point. I had three versions of this page; one with none of Peter’s thoughts, one with just the non-background ones, and one with all three like the version I posted. Ultimately I decided to go with this full one. I’ve been slowly leaning toward showing more thought bubbles (compared to historically showing none), especially with Peter. There are arguments both ways, but I think it’s fine as long as I don’t get too carried away with them… Ultimately there just aren’t that many chances to have Peter talk about what his thinking since his relation with neither Mium or Naomi really works that way.
In case it’s not clear, in panel 4 Lisa is moving closer to Mione. Arkady and Ila were sitting between them. I dunno why I felt compelled to clarify that, but somethings just need to be clarified!
I played around a little with the page background. Iterations will continue until morale page quality improves.
There is a new vote incentive, and it’s the result of our character poll from before. I posted the results in the comments to last comic if your curious, but the tl;dr of it was that unsurprisingly Naomi won, somewhat surprisingly Ila came second and Kally and (surprisingly) Mione tied for 3rd – I was pretty impressed by how many votes came in – was definitely a fun idea. I’ll probably do them in order from the poll for now – wouldn’t want to wear you guys out with constant polling 😉
What magic is Kally using now? Will Arkady survive playing against Ila? Will we be seeing magical tennis for a full chapter worth of updates at the rate this game is going? (No… no we won’t. At least. Not right now…).
There is a new blog post concerning the comic in my post-new-job life as of next week. Just in case you read this much rambling and thought, by golly, I need to read some more rambling! TL;DR – Don’t worry, comic will keep updating.
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Really like the layout of panels 5-10. Looking forward to seeing what magic it is! ^^
I just had a random thought: What would happen if a person using a racquet had their’s break?
Haha. Hahahaha. Heh. Erm.
Well, technically a racquet isn’t required to play, thus the point would continue until they lost (or won!), at which point they’d presumable get a new racquet and be out a security deposit if they’d borrowed a facility one… 😉
Well that makes the tactics of the game much more interesting.
Hmm. I hadn’t noticed that Mione’s eyes don’t match her hair. That tells us something, but I’m still not quite sure what it is. 🙂
I almost missed Ila’s, Mione’s, and Naomi’s reactions in the last three panels, because white lettering is a little harder for me to see. However, if Kally is doing what I think she’s doing, Ila recognizes it, Mione suspects it, and Naomi is eagerly waiting for it. I think Ila is about to see how a fully trained and very experienced mage uses that particular, um, spell. ^^
I voted for Mione, because she hasn’t had a turn in the spotlight yet, and I wanted to see what you would have her doing. 🙂
The mismatched hair/eyes is one of those things I think of as accidental mysteries. Like “what the deal with Mium” was at the start of the comic – it never really occurred to me it wasn’t apparent originally, but now that it’s a mystery I can’t just say the answer! 😉
I do the white text occasionally on the idea that it’s sorta okay if it’s missed; it’s when I don’t want to go full speech bubble 😛 As for what Kally is doing… we’ll see! 😛
Interesting on the vote – I think that’s a sensible sentiment, and sort of the idea I’m going with of just going down the list in order, give a few more characters the spotlight without letting a certain someone hog it.
I admit it’s partially my fault – Naomi is the “I-don’t-know-what-to-draw-guess-I’ll-just-draw-Naomi” character, in part because she’s popular, but it becomes a chicken-or-egg problem – if I drew other characters more often, would she still win? Who knows, either way, we’ll see some new ones as we go through the top 4 here after which I’ll think of a new thing to vote on.
Well, Naomi is kind of the mascot of the comic. She’s in every ad I’ve seen, she’s cute in looks and (mostly) actions, and with that purple hair she dominates any page she’s on, whether she’s actually doing anything or not.
It’s not a bad thing, but she’s easily the most recognizable character you’ve got.
The ads rotate; the current one has Peter and Kally. Naomi’s ads do better though… 😛
Yeah – I made the decision early on that she would sort of take the mascot roll, so that’s not exactly something I will call a coincidence 😉 – let’s just call it intuition that she’d do a better job at it then Peter… and Kally didn’t want it 😛
Early in her design I knew I wanted a character that was more expressive and energetic to balance out the main cast; though Peter in his current iteration didn’t exist, the previous iteration of what would become Peter was similarly muted/snarky.
Perhaps it’ll be surprising to note that she originally didn’t have purple hair in the earlier designs; I decided to include the hair color as plot element later, and realized it suited her remarkably well.
The earliest concept-wise characters in the comic are Tom, Nathan, and Kally; Tom and Nathan still exist, but are definitely in the background. Though they will show up eventually, they’ll like just pass through here and there as background characters.
So Ila and one of Peter’s classmates/”friends” are setting off for their own match. (What is his name, again?)
Too bad they don’t have a camera set up to record so Peter could watch later. Perhaps someone has a camera phone?
Arkady (no last name yet). Someday we’ll see some of the very vague method of the madness that goes into the naming.
I think Peter has similar regrets. Even beyond morbid curiosity, I reckon he’s pretty curious on what Ila can actually do as he hasn’t seen it first hand.
take it easy my friend. your artwork is superb and awesome at every page. even though i’m not big on sports myself, I think this is exciting. I hope Ila will be careful and Naomi doesn’t destroy the place.
Thanks! I know I should resist complaining about the art more, but it’s hard for me… 😉 Appreciate the kind words though!
I’d watch way more sports if they included magic, so that’s a pretty fair evaluation. I mostly call it ‘magic tennis’ jokingly as there is no way I could avoid the parallels in what it looks like if I tried, no matter how much I could claim otherwise 😛