Behind-the-Scenes with Hien Pham

Semi-Permanent Contributor Hien Pham shares his process of creating Phimosis, the comic that's going live tomorrow! Enjoy this peek behind the curtain and then tune in to Oh Joy Sex Toy tomorrow to read the final comic. The following text is all written by him :)

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Hey everyone!

For my latest OJST comic, I was finally ready to tackle a topic that's super personal and very close to my heart: Phimosis! Unlike foreskin, I can't cover everything, but I hope you'll find the comic fun and helpful!

I almost always enjoy doing cold opens for my comics, and for some strange reason I had this noir detective image stuck in my head and it made me laugh so I just had to go with it. The body of the comic was originally way more straight-forward and not detective themed at all, but I'm really glad my editors encouraged me to lean into it!

After handing in the coloured version above, Matthew suggested I could try turning down the saturation to match that "noir" mood more with the following examples:

Some comics are more collaborative, and some I take full ownership of (with editorial help from Matt and Ziggy). I will always be a lover and believer of the warm yellow lighting, but my editors were quite excited about the detective theme (Matt had a pun list that I couldn't quite fit into my script, haha!) so I wanted to spend a bit of time on the new colour direction.

I ended up going full black-and-white with bright "spot" colours. It took half a day, and it looks so different from anything I've done, but I think we're all quite fond of it! Maybe I can revisit this idea later down the line but at the start of art production, so I could control the greyscale values a bit more. But, all in all, definitely another one I'm proud of!

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your kind comments! I read all of them and they move me on a regular basis. Take it easy and take care everyone!

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Erika here again! 

Soooooo after all the work you read above and then all the prepping of the files on our end for the various ways they need to be formatted and uploading across the various OJST platforms... Matt realized something extremely inconvenient. 

The pages looked better the way Hien had originally colored them. 

Fuck. 

On a single-page by single-page basis, the monochromatic coloring complimented the detective noir story better, for sure! But when you stacked all those pages on top of each other for one long scroll, the way it's presented on the front page of OJST... well. 

It was too dark. The human warmth of the characters was absent. 

Hien was right all along. 

Below you can see the pages side-by-side, Hien's original coloring on the left and the monochrome coloring on the right: 

The moral of the story? JUST. TRUST. HIEN.

He knows what he's doing, for gosh's sake!!!!