ATC revisions are kind of a hobby. Hell, all of The Dualist and the first chapters of Dead City Radio and Transitional Voices have been rewritten twice. Three times for parts of The Dualist. Four, for a few scenes.

I’m not doing anything that big this time, I promise. In fact the point of this blog post is to lay out what I’m thinking of doing and why. If all goes to plan I’ll then follow this post up by performing the edits. There won’t be new story while I’m working on the script for Transitional Voices chapter four but there may well be new or at least revised art.

Here’s what’s under consideration:

[ THE CUNNINGLY PLACED FOLD ]

It’s a short list. Most of what I really want to change is line art, and while I’m not going to be redrawing entire scenes any time soon (except as noted) it certainly is a thing I’ve thought about more than once.

• Incursion doesn’t need a whole lot of work but I do need to account for the style transition from greyscale to color at some point. This is orders of magnitude cheaper and less complicated to do with a color book – it’s easier to flush the color out of three or four color pages than it is to fit a few color pages into an otherwise greyscale run. The original Ghost in the Shell is a good example. I’ve been thinking about retooling this scene so it starts greyscale and goes color, as it would eliminate the need to do it anywhere else. This scene is an ideal place to do that, and if I do tweak it I may do some fresh rendering work so it’s a better match with Leitmotif – or at least a less obvious mis-match.
• The big panel in reentry -10- could be so much better than it is. I tend to feel this about everything I work on after a few months (or years!) but this is low hanging fruit and one panel can be excused.
• details -20- and -21- need an overhaul. Beef badly needs to be redrawn, and the 2002 Lincoln needs to be replaced with a more appropriate vehicle. There’s no mistaking the hoopdi in suction for a newer vehicle, and replacing it with character-appropriate CG on these two pages gives me a great reason to eject some sub-standard line art at the same time.
• If poor quality line art is on the block then panel five of friction -8- may finally get some love.
• If I make the above changes, Impact -4- will need to be edited for continuity. I think that’s the only verbal reference to the lincoln, though I could be wrong – if I am then I’ll be inducing verbal continuity errors while correcting visual continuity errors. Perish the thought!

Like I said, it’s a short list. The big bits are Incursion and the replacement/upgrade of the Beef scene, followed by a continuity edit. Right now they’re under consideration; if I actually go through with them I’ll make some more noise and maybe tweak the front page template to briefly show edited page.

So, barring a major script breakthrough in the near future it looks like that’s the ATC to-do list for December!