Pain Response – Advanced Unlettered Preview

Slowly, panel by panel, this thing has been inching towards completion. It's measly six pages, but this thing has kind of pushed me to a limit.

One of the unexpected side effects of my mental shattering last fall was discovering that I cannot draw backgrounds anymore to save my life, at least not the way I used to do them all the time. I had to rewire my brain and figure out which method will work for me now, and after tons of spite and many fruitless attempts on my part, I finally landed on the one thing that clicks (at which point I discovered my imagination and/or spatial awareness operates on some sort fo a bizarre Daredevil-style radar ping, which I still find kind of funny).

And while the whole process sucked and I don't feel like repeating it anytime soon, the newly acquired skills did make my job significantly easier in several areas where I used to struggle a lot.

It doesn't help that the Maguuma jungle is kind of a nightmare scenario as far as scene composition is concerned. The jungle has to feel dense, but mustn't crowd the page or make it hard to read. It has to convey that yes, this is where several airships went down, but can't feel like a messy scrapyard. And it has to show some of the victims without crossing the PG-13 line.

Credit where credit's due: I probably wouldn't be able to do it without bingewatching plane crash documentaries. It's not like an airship flying low and slow above the treetops is directly comparable to a high-velocity impact of what is essentially an oversized aluminium bullet, but all the torn and twisted debris wouldn't look this shapely if I had to watch Chip & Dale instead.

This is just a fraction of all the various scrap states and reworks and in-progress shots the whole short story went through. Tons of work went nowhere or got scrapped later, some of it for the worse, but hopefully most of it for the better.

I'll still tweak around a thing or two when I set all the pages in a row to keep the colors and contrasts balanced in all of them (and also because a set of pages makes it easier for me to see the panels that stand out as difficult to read). But I honestly can't wait to get this off my table. I'll be pulling jungle vines out of my teeth for weeks.

Thank you for your incredible patience and support. I hope to properly reward it soon, since I moved along some projects in the background while jungle-delving.

Until then, please, keep yourselves safe.