Less than 24 hours between installments? Awesome. Not my favorite page, but hey – HUGE SHOVEL-LOADS OF PLOT! Huge, steaming loads.
Strip 189 – Good thing I only gotta draw James’ messed-up face the once. He’s Phantom Of The Opera-ing for the rest of the scene and will be either similarly patched or moderately healed in future scenes of DCR. Right now, he probably smells like bacon.
Strip 190 – A bit of a dud, compositionally. In tight the dialogue would have been difficult to fit, out further the line work would have been a smear and there’d be no clear indication of who was saying what at webscale. As it stands you see some of the BMRI. More would be nice – you’ll just have to wait for it!
Strip 191 – Were this a cartoon there’d probably be blinking lights and status changes on the interface panel and other things to indicate that the main airlock is cycling. Were this The Dualist I’d go totally Sergio Leone setting the scene. Information density wins out over other concerns in this case – I’m much happier with the next page and will be starting on it soon.
Seriously, with the shovel-loads – Yang’s an Army vet (his backstory kinda stops there – I haven’t worked on it since artskool and don’t see a need for more detail for a good long time), James has a hole in his face, and Judas Lang happens to have the highest ratio of story significance to lack of screen time of any character, with the possible exception of Michael West. Unlike Mike, Judas is a pretty crucial part of DCR. Bob Carrington’s been mentioned once or twice already – he was on the shuttle with everyone else, though he’s not scheduled to make an actual appearance until book five or six.
Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Rewrote some dialogue in panel four and added a line to panel five. This adds some vagueness to object reading and should make it very clear that Yang isn’t entirely thrilled with James’ decision to hire Lang.
