Comic for Thursday, Febuary 22nd
Warmages tend to be pretty good at fighting, though their abilities are not uniform, there are some things pretty much all of them can do. The reasons for this will likely become apparent in time. Some are a lot better the basic skillsets than others, while others are more specialized. In general, the common element is that they are mages primarily focused on, well, what their name implies.
The Q&A will go up MONDAY! with the monday comic, so if you have more questions, get ’em in soon! Email, comment, patreon, even technically twitter… whatever! Got a handful but will try to work through all of ’em.
…Naomi is a little special, yes. In her defense, the world seems like a pretty different place from her point of view.
Also, the “better from a wristwatch”. Ah, that was a long time ago. Actually, don’t click on the link. The art back then was even worse and will probably make ocular bleeding occur.
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Is that….is that Tyler wanting to recruit Naomi? Heh, that’ll be interesting…especially since technically they’re on the same side, aren’t they?
Mium as always is insisting on being the most hilarious conversation on the page while sounding so indifferent about it. Super-awesome HVW-cancelling AI….”I, currently, am a coat rack“. And “you set a bad example”.
(The problem, of course, is Naomi’s also chatting about her fight, which is also pretty fun, so I can’t tell who gets the prize….rematch next page? :P)
I like how they almost seem like they may declare a stalemate and remain on the roof. The Orish guy wants trouble but Mium is adept at diffusing trouble.
To say that Rovak wants trouble is something of an underestimate. It’s both his middle names. 😉
I like how “Mr. Zombie” starts off with, “Oh, look, a victim–er, some fun comes my way!” Then, he recognizes the speech pattern. “Oh, COME ON!”
I wonder, can Mium annul an I-code?
I think the answer is almost certainly yes. But I believe it would violate certain of his operating parameters, as nullifying an i-code is going to be very similar to killing.
Similar results if done at the right time. But in and of itself? Its no better or worse than nullifying any other defensive tricks. Or some offensive ones at that.
Bottom second-to-last panel: You have easily could have … (strike first have)
Fixed, thanks 🙂
I continue to love the story and the characters.
“I am a coatrack, currently…”
“Why are you here?”
“You could have easily taken me with you”
I think interpreted “Why you here?” as “why you, here?”
Fixed, thanks 🙂
Panel… (counts)… 15: “some*one* comes to me” or “some fun comes to me” (it’s unclear/awkward as-is; “some” seems like it should refer to “some things,” but “things” isn’t a real noun* there…)
16: “*a* coat rack”
17: “you *could* have”
*Although if it makes you feel better, I accidentally spelled that as “nown.”
Also, hah, knew there’d be a splinter-panel (like 8-10) when you said your panel count increased sharply, because that’s how you seem to get around the whole “finite amount of space on a page” restriction.
Although I note it’s now 18 panels, not 16… did you add Tyler last-minute, too?
Y’know, if you keep splitting panels like this, eventually, you’ll just be producing one line of pixels per scene, and we’ll be expected to read between them.
Huh… on second thought, I wonder how many things you could lay over each other in this way and have it still appear coherent? I have to imagine alternating lines of pixels would allow you to see both, but obviously there’s some upper bound… probably depends on the images, and you definitely can’t go too far with text, I guess.
There’s a couple parts to why pages get like this. First and foremost, it’s because I basically have no idea what I’m doing. I never really read print comics, so my grasp on paneling is in general is basically just… whatever.
Second, back when I went from 3 updates to 2, I decided that I’d try to combine pages wherever possible, so we frequently have mid page transitions that, while related, aren’t probably what normal writers would put on the same page – I try to make it work. I think this element has gotten less noticeable as I’ve adapted more to the new page size, but, it’s still sort of a thing.
Third, I really can’t draw action scenes well. I don’t really read any comics that have action scenes, I barely watch movies and those can’t really be used as reference… I mostly read books, and that just doesn’t really translate into a good reference. So… it’s mostly just like… ??? -> So I cheat as much as possible. Shattered panels and splintered frames tend to make the action scene more chaotic and, well, actiony, without me needing to draw… better?
I always think “PastUtopia, you need to draw more shit for Patreon, you need to practice drawing more action scenes -> wtf get drawing” but by the time I still get the next action sequence I still am like “uh oh… you forgot to study for this test, didn’t you PastUtopia”… expect I don’t think about myself by either my screen name or in the thread person, because that’d be weird.
Ultimate some people get a little bothered by it, but some people like it, and its just sort of how I ended up doing it. I think I’d like to take the style (if you can call it that) and refine and it and integrate it with “more better” paneling techniques, but, well, lot of the time the comic is still working on keeping it’s head above water as much as anything, as I’m dumb and acquire too many hobbies and commitments to my time 😐
PS: Oh, yeah. You totally caught me. I added in Tyler’s panels. 😉 I thought it worked better as part of this page for reasons, those were originally part of a future page.
For what it’s worth I think the splintered panels actually do a good job of conveying how rapid and chaotic these fights are. My brain interprets the splintered panels as being a sign of things happening in shorter periods of time than your full panels.
PastUtopia, do you think it’s a bad thing or a compliment when I look at your comic and think it would be a great reference for how to do action scenes and dialog if I ever got off my ass and did one of the web comic ideas I have?
Well, before I begin rambling, that is self-evidently a compliment, so thanks 😉 . The question is two-fold though, a) is it deserved, and b) is it a good idea to draw inspiration from what I do.
I’ll start with b); and the answer is – partially? I think the best bet is to expose yourself to a lot of styles and draw from what you like, but when I say this I’m saying “do as I say, not as a I do”. The comic you’ll make someday (I believe in you! 😉 ) will be part of a tradition building on all the things you’ve read and liked, and it’s not really up to me to say what you thought did the stylistic parts of webcomic creation correctly.
I can tell you that not everyone likes my tendency to fracture panels, and I myself – while clearly I like it – think I rely on it somewhat too much. I think there’s a lot of room in panel spacing and inset panels and breakout panels the like to improve, stuff that print comics have mastered, but me – who comes from having never actually read a print comic book besides like Calvin and Hobbes – does not really have that as part of my tradition, so I could improve how I do things by taking the best parts of styles that successful and improving mine with the lessons they’ve learned (not replacing, but assimilating). You can see like the first time I read a comic that doesn’t actually use page format, I started doing that for awhile, before I went “eh, I like the idea, but it’s not working” and went back to using pages. There’s now like a 10-20 page segment of the comic that’s drawn in some sort of waterfall flow because I stumbled into a comic that was clearly better at comicing than me, so I decided to see if i could use part of their comicing… I could not, so I went back to my way 🙂
Sometimes the way you do something is 90% better than how someone else does something, but you can still pull in the 10% they do better and learn from that. Its always a challenge to synthesize out what makes something good though.
All this is to say that all examples are valuable, and if you like how I do things, by all means learn from it, lean on it, take it and make it your own. That’s what the creative process is!
Now, as for a)… Here’s the thing. Even if I wanted, I can’t tell someone else that something they like is bad, because that’s not really up to me. I know that a lot of what I do comes from “aaaaaaaaaaaaaa I have no idea what I’m doing aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa uh-oh I’m out of time quick scribble something desperately so people are not disappointed in you” so from my perspective a lot of what I make is just the product of poor scheduling and compensating with caffeine. So, when I see other people have do good art and make coherent well made things I’m like “wow they are so good at this” without seeing the steps to make that.
Basically artists/writers/etc fall into two camps – either they are overly critical of what they make, or overly blind to the criticisms of what they make. Remarkably few people fall into the happy medium of being able to rationally evaluate their own work.
In general, as far as writing goes, I think that I am a better than dialog writer now than when I started, to be sure, and there’s a few reasons. Because I lean so heavily on “characters being characters in a world” I don’t need to force the characters to say plot stuff a lot, so the dialog is usually exposition light, which makes for better reading and lets their character bleed through more when they talk. I also think playing D&D as an eternal DM has made it even easier to for me to write character dialog – that’s part of why I was good at DMing and it feedback into writing the comic (i.e. insanity, being able to think in a characters frame of mind and speak – to an extent, in their voice). That’s the great thing about too many hobbies is you find they bleed into eachother.
tl,dr: blah blah blah, go make a webcomic! 😉
…I warned I was going to ramble for a long time. I do that. Sorry. 😉
Yeah, I knew you ramble a bit when I first saw your web comic. 🙂 That’s fine, who doesn’t ever ramble? I mean, besides my first roommate in college. There have been times where I thought whatever comic I do might be best named ‘tl;dr the comic’.
Fixed, thanks 🙂