Leitmotif end-of-chapter blitz, page one of three!

At this point, the last two pages have line art in place and just need to be shaded and spit-shined. All three pages were processed in parallel, with the bookend time-sinks being the character-relevant CG, specifically the Loki interior. More on that later.

“Condition Zulu” or “close to condition zulu” is a Navy term that means “make the ship water-tight.” Batten down the hatches and all that. In space I figure it means the same thing – check all the airlocks, make sure the vehicle in question is air-tight, and seal it up. LIDAR is a little less obtuse. It also wasn’t in the original script – I finally realized it isn’t exactly obvious that the Hemera gets double-tapped, and the dialogue tweak on this page and the next rectifies that.

Massive script and layout deviations. I hung on to the core concept of the original layout – the dramatic one-point down-the-umbilical shot. Everything else was thrown out and retooled with a fire axe. The end layout flows better and the end script reads better. Hence doing the last three pages at once – the layouts for all three were tossed, as was the script… though the script revisions were done much earlier in the year, before I really got rolling on page production.

I’ve got enough words in my head for one good-sized blurb – in the interests of spreading it out, I’ll be posting this page, then finishing the next and posting some more blurbage, then finishing the last one and blurbing some more. You’ll still be getting hit with three pages in one day (!), but they’ll be spaced out a bit.

20110821.06:38 – Corrected “condition zulu” to “condition zebra” after being fact-checked by an expert. I can’t say for certain where I got “zulu” from initially, but “zebra” googles in all the ways that “zulu” didn’t when I was double-checking the original page for accuracy.