The Far Side of Utopia

You came to see what my latest excuse to delay was, but it’s a comic! Didn’t see that coming, did you! 😀

In all seriousness though, my apologies this one ran so late. There is a few things going on. It is less that I was busy, though that is certainly a factor, but also it just was a page I was having some trouble with. There was a lot of versions of this page, and I don’t entirely love the final one either, but obviously quite a bit behind on the schedule, so…

The problem stems from the pace of the comic. This is the 8th comic of these scene. That is 8 weeks we’ve spent on this roof top. This entire scene is roughly… one page in the outline. This is an issue I have where it tends to get to action sequences; doing the comic at half a page a week, they are just… really hard to get bogged down in. So, rather than plotting the whole thing more carefully, I just took the next four pages of things that happened and stuffed them onto this page. This obviously makes it a bit choppier, but I think will be for the best.

Some things in here are just too choppy, like referring to Ashvalt before we saw him approach; I could probably have reduced something from the first 4 panels to make a panel for that, but at some point I just had to draw the comic and live with it. And I refused to cut the panel of Kally talking to her dragon because it amuses me, but it is somewhat difficult to convey because it’s sort of at the same time as the other 3 panels around it; typically that would be done better in a wide shot, but a wide show including Kally, the dragon, Ashvalt, Naomi and the kid would been a whole new challenge, as even pretty low resolution wide shots like panel 5 take a fair bit longer, and that’s about as not-wide as a wideshot can be (just a shot that shows characters from a distance). There is a reason almost every panel is fairly zoomed into characters even if it makes things a bit harder to follow, just because its way faster to draw.

Naomi is probably not completely burned out of power, but she does seem to have lost most of her boost by panel 4, and is starting to get exhausting. Naomi is someone that would have relatively little experience not gobbling down power as fast as possible. If she could dredge up more mana remains to be seen, though essentially as soon as the Family mage stops absorbing the power she’d bounce back to at least half power pretty much immediately. The Family mage got control of pretty much all the mana (it turned green), but Kally largely stopped intentionally oversaturating the area as her dragon was beating up the other people. As the Family mage alludes to, Kally didn’t actually summon her dragon, the dragon was already there, it just ripped up through the floor, presumably she brought it out before she made her appearance as a bit of a fail safe, she was just avoiding using it due to trying to avoid collateral damage; as we’ve seen before, the dragon is just sort of hard on buildings even when its not fighting things. This is one of those things where I had planned to spend a few more panels on it, but ultimately didn’t really want to spend a week elaborating on it.

How Ashvalt “heard” probably will be elaborated on later, though.

I’m giving some thought to how to tackle this problem in general. I think in this case as I was just generally distracted by life, I just wasn’t necessarily managing the conversion of outline to comic particularly well.

At least the Kickstarter for my D&D stuff is done, the preorder store is done, the shipping is sorted out (for the time being), and things are slowly getting back to normal. I still have to actually do a ton of work for that project, but it’s more like a job from here and less like an life consuming void (really, refreshing the Kickstarter page was like… at least 10% of the time spent there… 😀 )

Anyway… comic.