Started the blurb for this last night, when the line art hit the page and the thing was ready to shade. That quickly sprawled into something else – not a blurb so much as The Complete Strategic History of Heirotus. Since that’s bound to change quite a bit* it doesn’t belong in a blurb, so I’m starting fresh. I kept what I wrote, but won’t be posting it here. Some of it may make it into the proper Heirotus writeup, a lot of it probably won’t.
James gets to be passionate and plotty – every time this guy engages CAPSLOCK he’s spouting off about Things That Matter. In The Dualist he’s huffy about the political events that will ultimately shape book five. In this case he’s fired up about the largely-unmentioned basis of the entire story.
That’s something we’ll eventually see in more detail. And by “eventually” I mean “in the next chapter of DCR,” as opposed to some future book likely to enter production when I’m in my forties. We’ll see it in more detail there, too. But we’ll see it in the next chapter of DCR first, dammit.
Script and thumbnails – a couple of minor changes. Camera angle etceteras for panel one to make everything fit, and minor angle/composition adjustments to maintain visual continuity. Happy with how Aleph turned out in panel four, and the inking experiment with James in panel three turned out fairly well – his first pass inks were slammed down quickly, to put an aesthetic point on his rage. The second pass inks muted the effect a bit, but added an emphasis he wouldn’t have had with single-pass inks.
A small but significant piece of the overall backstory,* some hints at James’ background and motivations, another demonstration of the unreliability of psychics (and Aleph in particular), some shouting, and Lang’s last appearance for the chapter. A fairly critical page, all things considered.
The next one’s rendered – it’s the last full page using this environment, the printer’s still low on ink (but still kickin’!), and the rest of this month looks like it’ll be ! instead of ?, so… I should be able to bust it out this week, I think. After that, things get slippery again – a couple of pages of limited CG and hopefully by the time that’s done I’ll have the footage I need for the middle of the chapter.
* It should be obvious by now that ATC is a sort of reverse-von Daniken thing. The stellar-human and meta-human races appeared out of nowhere tens of thousands of years ago across hundreds of worlds, and every planet that humanity clung to and thrived on has had to come to terms with a sort of cultural "phantom limb syndrome" - in all cases their point of commonality is a fossil and archeological record that Does Not Match with the "native" fauna. The obvious implications (and the technical "gotchas") are a major story point of Transitional Voices and the rest of ATC post-Dualist, though it'll obviously be awhile before this aspect of the story is addressed in sufficient or satisfying detail.
