Week 321! (Page 430 Finished)

THIS MARKS PAYMENT FOR THE WEEK OF 9/27-10/3.

Well, technically a week late, but here's page 430 finally finished, going up for the public later today.

I have to say that boy this page was a mild mistake and I still hate past-me for having written it without much care on the hidden difficulty in doing anything with it. It's fairly easy to just write down in a script, "and then cut to Connor in a laser tag/skatepark hybrid arena struggling to stand on hoverskates, get shot by a laser, fall down, and have Campy calmly skate by", very typical pratfall and joke. But then you realize... boy, actually drawing a laser tag arena accurately is hard, cause they all use glow-in-the-dark paint for crazy murals and wall designs all over the place. And then you combine that with the fact it needs at least one skating ___pipe to illustrate the combining of the two sports together, AND the fact you now need to design hoverskates alongside the laser tag apparel, AND you need to do the typical framing and drawing of such a scene for multiple panels. It's a lot of extra work and effort in figuring all that out to whatever degree I could, all for a single joke and for a place that's probably never going to show up again. Granted, Connor getting 'hurt' here is part of the storyline, but still, yeesh.

Now it took a while of looking at laser tag arenas for reference to try and get that glowy effect everything in those places has. I did try to paint stuff manually on the walls, like bricks and space murals, but... I have never been good at painting, I can't grasp it for some reason, and painting to have a "glow-in-the-dark paint" effect and make it look not terrible felt out of my level of ability for the time I had, so I went with sort of a paint spattering effect on the walls instead. The pillars and second level with a fence are things actual laser tag arenas have when they're not using thin walls instead, and, well, in the interest of making this seem like a bad idea to combine these two things together, obviously the only way up there would be quarter-pipes that you'd have to skate up or down. I actually did model the entire arena to have maximum options for the camera angle, and yeah there's multiple quarter-pipes littered throughout, as well as thin bridges connecting the second-floor places like in real laser tag arenas. Maybe not extremely clear in the page itself but the idea was ultimately showing why you don't hear about rollerskating while playing laser tag that often.

Speaking of laser tag, the boots/skates themselves I think were halfway inspired by regular ski boots and halfway inspired by the self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future Part II. Nothing super fancy, thought a little bit back to the robot museum guide from way back in terms of how 'hovering' works here, although the idea of these "skates" is probably more focused on air propulsion than the robot was. Finally, the laser tag gun and chest piece were more or less directly lifted off of an actual laser tag set I owned as a kid called "Laser Challenge TeamForce Set", which I thought was super cool despite never really using it to play laser tag. It came with a neat little robot-looking thing that moved around and was supposed to act as target practice. I imagine it was influential on me to some degree, so it seemed like an easy and more personal laser tag equipment set to throw in than any other.

Oh, yeah, also I had to change the name of the page. It was originally "Shot in the Back", as a vague reference to Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name"? And I originally intended for Connor to actually get shot in the back by Campy. However, I ended up blocking the scene where Connor was facing Campy's direction when shot, because him being on the right and falling left worked better for framing and filling the panel than him being on the right and falling right, especially when Campy entered it. So now it's "Shot in the Front", which I guess is still close enough to "Shot in the Heart", but it does lack the subtle "betrayal" aspect of Campy shooting a clearly-struggling Connor without much emotion. Oh well.