As previously, another batch finished in one swell foop. As previously, a few days of on-and-off work, with the last of the inking and all of the shading and final tweaks done today.
It works, but I’m not entirely happy with it – various lighting decisions that worked for the previous page wound up not working very well for this one, so the first three strips are pretty muddy. I may tweak this at some later date – if it’s an issue for hardcopy then I’ll definitely want it fixed for a trade paperback or issue.
Strip 157 – Establishing that the ship’s PA/AI isn’t broadcasting via radio – or if it is, the range isn’t long enough for the shuttle to pick up.
Strip 158 – Thoob!
Not only did the glass break before impact (see previous metadata regarding the doors), it imploded. A perfect storm of anti-physics. The Aeon has character.
Strip 159 – Given the amount of work that went into the shuttle it would have been nice to see more of it… on the upside, having seen only the ‘nose’ of it, the rest is unspoiled, which means the geometry can make an appearance in chapter three of Transitional Voices with no additional work. Yay!
Strip 160 – The first appearance of the ATC ligature in-comic, space-fold of the Aeon, and other forms of plot-critical awesomeness. Huzzah.
The flashback is almost over – two more pages, four more strips. After that I’ll be on hiatus for the foreseeable future. My workload has gone critical, and I plan to devote whatever spare time I have (usually reserved for the comic) to the production of a “trailer” for ATC. I have good-sized chunks of it storyboarded, but still have a lot of fine detail to figure out before I start production. While that’s going on, there’s a couple of urgent things on the DCR to-do list that I’ll have to work through after the next four strips are done. While the story is plotted, the next section is an outline, with the last draft a notebook or two back. That means script revision, layouts, etceteras. I also need to decide if I’m going to stick with strips, tweak the strip format, or move to pages…. and I need to decide if there’s a point to continuing to post strips to the DCR website when I’m posting full pages to ATC simultaneously.
More on that after deliberations have concluded, and more about the other bits in the metadata of the next batch of strips. I expect to have those up at some point this coming week, workload permitting.
