Affective memory (aka “sense memory”) is an important part of Dead City Radio. The story was born out of a 2005 nicotine detox kicking my head back to pre-smoking in Pittsburgh – my first seven quarters in artskool. That experience – the month-plus “sense memory high” – lodged in the subconscious and eventually resurfaced as the trigger of Jason’s past life regressions. In this case the club managers’ strong resemblance to Michael Yang combined with a blast of cocaine kicks off a wibble of event memory. For your average person that might be an unprompted glimpse back to high school or waiting for a bus or a sunset or the smell of spring or whatever – in Jason’s case the combination of stimulus has kicked loose something he hasn’t actually experienced (in this life). His reaction just happens to be strong enough to register on the BMC HRD and on the Hemera DRHRD, umpty light years away.*
Aeon’s sensory apparatus is a bit different – not an HRD in the sense of the equipment used by modern humans. Aeon’s “nose” is a bit more discriminating, and its means of reception and transmission have more in common with the Callback Array aboard the Sabrosa.
If you’re new to ATC this might be a bit of a “what?” moment. Read DCR and you’ll have most of the pieces. Read The Dualist and you’ll have a few more.
Thursday, near 5pm. In seven or eight hours I’ll post the next page and you’ll be able to read ATC in complete chronological uninterrupted order – OE.1 through TV.42 – for the first time, with no fear of further digressions or interruptions. The fear of continued typo corrections and continuity adjustments persists, though I’m fairly certain we’ve swatted most of ’em! Friday morning ATC production will finally be where it was in August of 2008 – moving forward.
We’re done with the Forward Back, as of… well, technically now. More exuberance in the OE.10 metadata.
2012 11 15, 03:32 – Initial layout and dialogue and so forth a ways back. And I do mean a ways. Recent modifications have munged the editing dates but half of the bottom four panels and the photograph were worked out weeks ago. The night shot of the backside of bedlam and the Hemera shot were generated yesterday afternoon, which leaves the rest.
It’s a lot of drawing, honestly – frankly I don’t expect to see this thing hit production until December. We’ll see!
2012 11 21, 03:06 – Reference dummies output; ready for line art. Backgrounds created for the previous page work for the top half of this page, so… line art plus one background remaining! It currently looks like I should be able to pencil and ink Wednesday and shade and post Thursday.
20:52 – Pencilled. A quick quest in Fallout: New Vegas and then on to inks. It’s the holidays and I’ve got Fuck and All planned for Thursday beyond SUPER ART TIME GO – I can take it slow tonight if I want to, dammit!
As I haven’t done two-pass inks since DCR.2, NOTE TO SELF – scan the first-pass inks before the second pass. Just in case.
2012 11 22, 02:40 – Ready for shading. Which I will do while y’all’re eating turkey and facebooking about football or whatever. Kinda bummed about ATC as the sole holiday plan, but by the same token only having one big item on the to-do list and ample time to do it is pretty awesome.
Oh, and the two-pass inks turned out better than expected. I followed those with minimal cleanup to help nudge things further towards the overall roughness of 2005. I’m confident I’ll be able to pull this thing off.
13:39 – Background for panel nine complete. Ready for shading.
15:41 – Two panels left!
16:09 – Principal shading complete.
16:32 – Go for commentary (the bit above the timestamps) and posting.
* The DRHRD isn’t a Star Trek FTL Writers Didn’t Do Their Homework sensor. The exertion of human will dissipates into Am, and the Black Box Bits of the DRHRD are powerful enough to pick that up. The fact that the HRD suite is arelativistic and the optics suite is relativistic means the Hemera computers now have to do an absolute truckload of math to match that blip up to a possible planet. What might be “20 light years as the crow flies” could easily turn out to be “30 light years as the crow slingshots to avoid mass influence while the ship transitions past planets and stars in their actual locations as opposed to their locations observed from the point of insertion.” Space is pretty damned big so mass influence isn’t that much of an issue – but knowing exactly where your destination is going to be when you get there requires a great deal of observation and computation.
