20090821 (14) – Shirt fix pass. Since this page and forward are subject to either page offset (assuming pages are added) or new panels being injected, the remainder of the chapter is Eggshell Land until I get things figured out. Which I haven’t, yet. In the meantime, I can fix shirts like a mother. They’ll need to be fixed either way, see… so this level of pre-prep is Super Effective!

20090823 – Forgot O’s shirt in panel three. Yeah, he’s the size of a dime… but it’s there and you can see it at 100-200%. Fixed!

(later) – Page prepped for a new panel to be inserted later. Panels 1-3 scaled, 4-6 widened and scaled down, 7 and 8 trimmed, and 9 trimmed for height. 4-6 were all rendered “wide” to begin with and fortunately uncropped, so widening the shots didn’t require re-rendering – just some photoshop positional work. I also did a quick type test to make sure the dialogue would fit, and it should. Page is ready for the new Val panel.

20090829 – Val panel work complete for pages 714, 715, 716, 717, 724, and 725. I processed all ten panels in one taller-than-normal page file, did some quick cross-checking to make sure they more-or-less matched with the Thad and Ornix pages, did the usual dummies, pencilling, inking, shading, tweaking… merged the whole mess into one layer and then pasted the flattened panels into each of the prepared pages.

I did the necessary modeling (adding the guts to the blast door safety panel) Thursday afternoon, the renders on Thursday and Friday, the page setup on Friday, and line art, assembly and shading on Saturday. About eighteen to twenty hours all told, with maybe eight or nine of that being actual work. Stylistically Val doesn’t quite match – it’s been over two and a half years, after all – which is one of the main reasons I played it quick and oh so very sloppy. Major anatomical issues don’t stand out as much when they’re surrounded by even bigger inconsistencies.

In terms of forward editing, I’m not sure how I feel about having flattened the text sound effects – changes will be a pain. Hopefully I won’t need to make any.

The panels are what they are and are paced the way they’ve been paced in order to visually work with the pacing of everything else – I tried to make the new panels fit as seamlessly as possible, and I think I pulled it off.

Worth the effort if only to see the Psychic Voulge in action against an inanimate object. It might be hell against NBEs, but doors? It totally fails doors.

20090909 (14) – Lettered.

Cast

  • A traumatic Awakening in the summer of 1997 was just the beginning of Thad’s emotional problems. The disappearance of most of his Pittsburgh friends a few weeks later compounded his issues and, while he...

  • Ornix doesn’t let trivial things like ethics and morality get in the way of his loyalties or sense of reality. A longtime friend of Thad and a fellow “victim” of the Templar Waking God...

  • BMC Long Term Care patient 6656, Annathena Val (hence Val) is a Cognitive Empath, born with an incredibly rare neurological disorder that arises only under a “perfect storm” of genetic abnormalities – a condition...

Glossary Articles

  • .50 Caliber Revolver

    The unbranded four-chamber .50 caliber revolver is a handgun favored by Ornix. It fits his minimum requirements of being ridiculously high powered and man-portable. Ammunition capacity is not a consideration. Unlike Thad, Ornix is...

  • Bethlehem Medical Centre

    Bethlehem Medical Centre (BMC) is a hospital and detention facility located in the first parallel universe attached to Earth (aka “Earth 2.0”). Were it in this universe, the building would be a short drive...

  • Grenade Launcher

    Grenade launchers are single-shot projectile weapons that lob explosives over a moderate distance. The model depicted in The Dualist appears to be an unsighted variant of the M-79, whereas the wire-stocked variant shown in...

  • Rattan Cane

    The 4′ long 1/2″ thick Rattan Cane is a walking stick and sometimes-weapon favored by Thad, who also uses it as a focus for harnessing and projecting his psychic will. Dyluck uses the weapon...

  • Sub-level One

    Sub-level One connects the surface levels of Bethlehem Medical Centre to the more interesting bits beneath. Points of interest include an information kiosk, vending machines, plenty of storage space, and the Biomagnetics Lab. While...