[Announcement] Lust & Lore - Part 4

Hi everyone!

The next comic coming up is the fourth and final part of Lust & Lore! I have to admit, I'm actually feeling a bit sad to bring this series to an end - it's definitely been one of the most fun projects for me to create. But all good things must come to an end eventually, and I already have a bunch of new story ideas lined up! ^^

In this final part, we'll be meeting yet another new character who presents Chloé with a rather... extensive request - one that demands pretty much everything from the Cheat Master Deluxe Edition™. And maybe, just maybe, a few things will happen to our main character Chloé too. ^^

Since I want to show the transformation of our new character and give Chloé's story a proper, (hopefully) satisfying conclusion, this part will probably end up being a bit longer again - I'm guessing around 25 pages, so I'll likely need a day or two longer than usual. But the comic should be ready by the end of next week, or at the very, very latest, the beginning of the week after!

The Curve Control – Part 2

To sweeten the wait until then, you're - as always - invited to listen to me ramble about the previous release ^^
And this time that's Part 2 of The Curve Control!

But before we dive into that, there's something else I want to get off my chest real quick (and I'm doing it right at the beginning while I hopefully still have most of your attention). I'm not sure how much you've explored my website besides the main page. There used to be a page called Filter Comics, which... basically no one used, because it was kinda useless haha. It just listed all the tags on my site and let you filter comics by them, and it also included a list of all comic series, which was completely redundant because the homepage already does that.

Over the past few weeks, I gave the page a bit of an overhaul to make it (hopefully) a little less useless. Tag filtering is still there, but with a new design. The comic series list is completely gone, and I replaced it with Top Lists for comics. You can now see rankings for the most popular comics (based on page views on my site) from the past 30 days or of all time. The idea is to make it easier to discover comics you (hopefully) enjoy.
No clue if that feature is actually useful to you - some of my older comics haven't aged all that well haha, and often the newest ones are the best anyway - but I've poured quite a bit of time into the whole thing, so I at least wanted to give it a little shoutout here. Feel free to check it out if you're curious: https://www.boobacious.be/filter-comics/

(And please ignore the fact that my very first comic Breast Day at the Beach is currently ranked #8 among the most popular comics of the last 30 days - there was a temporary bug that counted views of the main page as views for that comic. For a while, it even hit rank #1 uff)

Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's really get to The Curve Control!

A central element I changed in this comic was the lighting (curious if any of you noticed). In my previous comics (including Part 1 of The Curve Control), the characters always looked pretty glossy - like they were covered in sunscreen, reflecting tons of light. That's just how the model I use renders things by default, and I never really gave it much thought.
But honestly, I always felt it looked a bit off. I mean, yeah, it's anime style - but people don't usually reflect sunlight that much. So in Part 2, I put special effort into removing the gloss and making the characters more matte. Depending on the scene, the difference is more or less noticeable, but overall, I think the change works well. At first, I felt that some areas of the images now looked empty or even a bit boring without all that shine, but my brain (and hopefully yours too haha) got used to the new look pretty quickly, and that weird feeling went away. So from now on, I think I'll be dropping the glossy effects entirely in my future comics. But feel free to let me know your thoughts on that ^^

Another thing I spent a lot of time on again is illustrating the pages and... Eureka! I think I finally found a way to add hearts that I genuinely like. With all the previous styles - red floating hearts, black floating hearts, etc. (you've seen them all over the past few releases) - I was never quite satisfied. It always felt just a little "off."
So this time, I decided not to reinvent the wheel and went with the style many mangas use: hearts in tiny speech bubbles - and WOW, I love it haha! Especially in scenes where the character is completely lost in bliss, it looks fantastic in my opinion. It's clearly visible, but doesn't draw too much attention or clash with the rest of the page - and yeah, it's also kinda sexy sometimes ^^. Knowing myself, I'll definitely experiment with more styles, but chances are we'll be seeing this one more and more often from now on.

And lastly, I want to talk about text effects again. By that, I mainly mean stylized text outside the usual speech bubbles. I played around with that a bit more this time and... I'm actually really happy with it ^^. I feel like I managed to make it fit into the page better than I did in the alternate ending of Genie's Gift, while still keeping its charm. Especially on page 9 and page 18, I think the stylized text adds a ton of flair. Sure, it's still not perfect and I'll definitely keep experimenting, but overall it already feels pretty solid to me.

The text is also currently going through what I've started calling the Boobacious Hype Cycle haha. I discover something new, immediately want to cram it into my comics, and at first I overdo it to the point where it's impossible to miss (and totally distracting). Then, slowly over time, I learn to use it more meaningfully - so that you don't really notice it consciously, but it still makes the pages feel more exciting. The best example is probably how the characters sometimes break out of the panel borders. Early on, I used to emphasize it so hard it practically screamed for attention - so much that it always looked a bit off. Nowadays, however, that effect is in almost every single page but often so subtly that you won't even notice it unless you look closely (OK, there were two pages in Curve Control Part 2 where I went a little overboard again haha, but the general trend is still true), but hopefully it still makes the pages feel more alive.

Okay! With this little deep dive into my mind, I'll wrap it up for today ^^

We'll catch up again when the fourth and final part of Lust & Lore drops.
Until then, take care!