This is the oldest page that hasn’t been redrawn. It’s DIRT OLD. Paleozoic. Somewhere in the first three sentences of the book of Genesis. It’s old, it’s hideous, and it was constructed in such an amazingly half-assed fashion that the linework is almost completely edit-proof. Not totally, but damned close. I was able to skew Raven’s appearance in the fourth panel into something less slanted, fortunately. This still happens with my linework – that “drawn at an angle” look that Errant Story used to have a million years ago. I’ve been skew-correcting for that before the characters hit the pagefile for a long time… but there was a time when I didn’t, and that time was this time. The paleozoic.

Also, as this page was one of the original 1800×2400 batch, it’s been scaled UP instead of DOWN. Fortunately thanks to some judicious eyeballing and extending of the backgrounds, only panel three went up in size… and not by much!

Due to the age of this scene, I’m doing much less with the cleanup. You’d think I’d be doing more, right? Well, look at the page. Look at it, and tell me a redraw wouldn’t be faster than a fullblown cleanup. If I’m to get the second edition finished this year, I have to draw the line somewhere… the line begins with this scene and can be summed up thus: From here forward I’ll be fixing only what I consider to be the most glaring problems.

Unless I get bored or carried away.

Visual continuity falls under “glaring problems,” obviously. After the reformatting, the biggest change is the addition of Raven’s collar pips – this is, like, the ONE page in the ENTIRE story that I forgot ’em. Which makes sense after a fashion, as these are the first two drawings of Raven.

Also filed under scene-wide glaring problems – the background. For years it’s been a scan of a slide of something work-related. Now it isn’t. Not quite to my liking, but it solves the problem nicely…. and I made it, instead of photoshopping the heck out of something I didn’t. Woot, woot.