Commentary: Pages 26-27

Page 026 - Woolies

Another classic, a page that was gonna be 2 pages. One page for Sunny, one page for Moon-Soo. And even before that was a version that excised Moon-Soo from the page altogether, so it was just Sunny. Instead Sunny would talk about him in third person:

There’s some good material here, and a fun gag about Sunny not being allowed to swear at work, but going down this route would have meant Moon-Soo would have no appearances at all between chapters 1 and 4! That’s just no good for a member of the iconic trio! Moon-Soo already drops in prominence compared to Sunny soon after this, no need to make that contrast even starker by dropping him out of the comic outright. Besides, in a situation like this it’s better to have Jasper find out for themself what’s up with Moon-Soo than be told about it. More kinetic that way! You wanna err on the side of things happening vs. things not happening here.

Peri proffers:

Another big change to the Sunny-Jasper exchange in the second draft of this page came in the form of Jasper’s explanation of why they have the afternoon off. In the original version, Jasper told the truth about there being a second exorcist. We changed that Jasper claiming that they engineered their own free afternoon by asking Rex for it–something which the reader knows is 100% a fabrication, because we saw how it really went down on the last page. But Jasper knows that it is what Sunny wants to hear (she dislikes Rex and wants Jasper to stand up for themself!), and they’re perfectly willing to bend the truth to give her what she wants and get back in her good graces. Thus we reinforce two important character traits about Jasper: they are perfectly happy to lie in order to maintain a comfortable status quo, and they are good at it.

I’m going a bit out of order here, but this theme also comes up again in the scene we added back in with Moon-soo. This gave Moon-soo a chance to question Jasper’s debating methods back in Chapter 1, pointing out that Jasper was at best streeeeetching the truth about the car factory in order to win the debate with Rodney. It works on a number of levels, since it establishes Moon-soo as a character with rock solid logical faculties (which is also how his and Jasper’s debate styles differ!) and it invites the reader to reflect more critically on Jasper’s actions more broadly as this pattern of well-intentioned untruthfulness emerges.

In either case, the page would have had more time with Sunny. She gets plenty of spotlight down the line, though, so as great a loss as this may be I think we can cope. Bigger loss was we lost some really good lines from Rhys.

Look who! It’s a dog version of my dear brother Rhys. Rhys you may recall is the other big collaborator on Foreach besides Peri, he wrote some lovely words in the introduction for this commentary series. Whenever I design these characters I always make sure to check in with the person the character is based on to see if there’s any design elements they want included. Rhys here wanted to be a borzoi since that’s the most Rhys-like dog. I mostly complied, although I didn’t make him quite as shaggy as the real breed so he wouldn’t be muscling in on Jasper’s design territory. Gotta keep our protagonist unique!

Peri says: Side note, but one of my favorite aspects of Rhys’ design is the way that you can see his second eye in the glasses frame. It’s a neat trick to preserve the expressiveness of the face despite the constraints that come with having an animal head. And sort of like the classic anime trick of having eyes and eyebrows visible through a character’s bangs, your brain doesn’t even notice it’s there until you point it out!

Rhys here is subbing in for a role that would otherwise have gone to an extra, that of Sunny’s manager who gets possessed by Headless Ed. Felt appropriate, since Headless Ed sprung forth from Rhys’ form in real life as well. This does have the unfortunate side effect of he’s spent his screentime thus far Getting Owned, which I guess I could play off as a sibling rivalry thing, but honestly he deserves better. If we had more time in this bit he would have had a little more banter with Sunny, a little more time to drop some classic Rhys lines. He’ll get his due. Mark my words: someday, Rhys shall return.

Peri ponders:

When cutting this page down, I did have some concerns about Sunny’s treatment of Rhys coming off as Just a Little Too Mean. I wish we could have engineered Rhys’ response to Sunny’s needling to sound a little more like he was in on the joke, more of a willing participant in her acerbic banter than a victim of it. We actually did have a few readers who felt a bit miffed on his behalf, but it seems to have gone over well enough with the majority of the reader base. And as Lum promises, Rhys will get his due in good time!

There really is a whole lot to talk about this page, though, we got a whole entire second new character to talk about!

It’s Clip! Moon-Soo’s adorable datemate. Clip has a pretty circuitous history as a character. Their first iteration was more a hazy idea than anything concrete, that Moon-Soo would be the only one of the three Home Bound friends who was actually in a relationship, despite being the least traditionally charismatic, as it were. It felt like one of those things that was true to life in that mundane way, you know? Which of your friends have partners isn’t like some 1:1 correlation with who you think is the most outgoing and attractive, the world don’t work like that. So this first iteration of what-would-become-Clip would have been Moon-Soo’s girlfriend from the year below who hadn’t graduated yet.

For a while that idea fell by the wayside; it was a fun idea but not anything I was that invested in. Eventually, though, it found its way back into the comic for a simple reason: conservation of homosexuality.

See, for most of the three year period in between Foreach’s conception and its launch as a webcomic, Home Bound had a whole extra world of characters involved in the form of the Faerie Kingdom. In addition to the ghosts, Fairwell would be home to a bevy of Faerie spirits who our heroes would get caught up in all sorts of debates with. At the center of this would be the two fae courts, the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court, the orderly and chaotic sides of the fae, long and bitter enemies. But the two courts had recently become joined together as one: you see, the Seelie King and the Unseelie King had fallen in love, and in marrying they had unified the courts over which they preside, much to the chagrin of their subjects. This precarious political situation would have been the source of much conflict, and the dastardly Headless Ed would have used this conflict to further his own nefarious ends.

Sick idea right? I think you can guess why we didn’t use it. Can you fuckin’ imagine? Chapter 1 would have been like 50 extra pages long and half of them would have been devoted to explaining the intricacies of fae politics. 

As correct as the decision to cut that stuff was, it also meant excising the two gayest men in the comic. A necessary sacrifice, you can understand, yet it still felt like a betrayal of my principles to de-gay Foreach so radically. Where was my queer solidarity? I needed to find a new place to insert some serious gayboys in there, and I needed to do it fast.

Enter: Moon-Soo’s… BOYfriend. Boyfriend at first, anyway. All Jasper’s friends have some kind of celestial motif that comes through in their names and designs: for this character I came up with the name “Clip”, which I then realised had so much nonbinary swag I’d be letting my own gender team down if I didn’t enby-ise them. That means Clip’s been though three genders now, from girl to boy to NB, which is also I imagine how their gender journey canonically progressed. I actually write surprisingly few enby characters for a nonbinarous individual myself… there’s underlying reasons there but let’s not get into it here, we gotta talk design:

Clip was meant to contrast Moon-Soo, because any good pairing of characters should juxtapose each other. Instead of being big and broad, they’re small and willowy. And more fashionable! Moon-Soo has that very default-masc style of fashion, shirt and shorts, and I wanted to contrast that, maybe imply these two came from pretty different social circles. It kinda tells a story, yknow? Maybe there’s something each envied about the other, and that’s what brought them together. As always I stole my idea of what fashion looks like from Splatoon, same trick as with Sunny’s double tank top getup. The big jacket and big shoes work well to create interesting zones of weight within Clip’s design here, big puffy shapes to break up the skinny legs and ears. And there’s the pitch-black fur, mainly ‘cause I really like the look of having a character’s skintone be fully filled in with ink and it was a good way to allude to Clip’s celestial motif. What that motif actually is I leave as an exercise for the reader.

You can see on this design Clip’s eyes are drawn pretty differently to what ended up in the final product. Halfmoons instead of stripes. That’s cause when I was hashing this one out I didn’t really have a solid idea of Clip’s personality. Like, they were cool, I guess, and they liked Moon-Soo, but beyond that I didn’t have much. It was only when I was actively writing this page that my hand was forced and I had to come up with something to set them apart.

What I settled on was: thembo. They’re kinda stupid! But in a lovable way. It was a space not yet explored by pretty much the rest of the cast, so it immediately gave them a good little niche. For a last-minute trick to distinguish their character voice, in addition to their generally high-energy speaking style, I gave them the quirk of repeating short phrases a lot:

With this new personality, the old design with the halfmoon eyes just didn’t have the energy to match the new personality. The art and the writing were at odds with each other! I talk a lot about the emotional palette a character’s design affords them, and New Clip was expressing emotions that Old Clip’s design just could not deliver. So that’s where you get those stripes for eyes, to really sell that chirpiness.

In addition to all these characters, we also have the Debut of INCORRECT JASPER

JASPER NOOOO YOUR NECK IS TOO SHORT

For some reason this little diversion into off-model Jasper really made an impression on me. Jasper’s neck should be long! That’s an important aspect of their character design, gives them a kind of gangliness. But I straight up forgot that part here after a few months of not drawing Jaspers, and so this incorrectness snuck up on me. Short necked Jasper only lasted like 2 pages but it somehow stuck forever in the back of my mind as a cautionary tale. Like this is what happens if I get sloppy. The importance of following the model!

Not to say it’s so cut and dry, mind you. Sunny gradually gets chubbier over the course of the comic. But I think that adds to her personality. Even with Jasper, those ears gradually getting bigger over time I think adds to the appeal of the design. The distinction between evolution and decay is not a hard one!

Peri prattles on:

This page really stands out in my memory as a big milestone of figuring out what Foreach’s pacing was going to be like for the rest of the comic. The first chapter is a thing of beauty–but it’s also pretty unique in just how tight the whole thing is. My impression is that Lum had pretty much the entire thing mapped out in their head the way they wanted it before they started making it, which just isn’t possible for the rest of the comic. It’s just too sprawling! There are so many moving pieces that as the story goes on we need to stay flexible in the details in order to be able to respond to the realities of making the comic. Sometimes this means slimming a scene down or beefing another one up, sometimes it means moving page breaks around so they fall at more natural spots, or because a sequence ends up being more taxing to make for one reason or another and we need to put less on that page.

This means that as we headed into the second chapter, we had some figuring out to do in order to find a natural rhythm to the pages. And one of the things we discovered is that Lum tends to like a snappier pace to things whereas my comfort zone is to take things a bit slower, and that Foreach pacing tends to work best when we kind of meet in the middle. Once we decided to show-not-tell Moon-soo’s bit, we had to decide whether to squish it onto the same page as Sunny’s bit or let it spill onto the next page. We played around with both, and ultimately ended up deciding to keep them together, since they’re basically telling the same story (i.e. that Jasper is unused to having this kind of spare time and doesn’t know what to do with it.) Once we figured that out, it ended up being a kind of “template” for how to put on a single Foreach page. Even though the vertical length, number of panels, or word count of a page can vary drastically, we still aim for about the same amount of story on one Foreach page. One Foreach-sized unit of story. A freach bit. Frit? I’ll workshop it.

Page 027 - Prettiest

Have you ever noticed it’s kinda freak behaviour to look someone up on your phone and then just rock up to visit them in person? Like what the fuck Jazza, just call her. But of course, having Jasper show up at Sitara’s doorstep is more visually dynamic, and also the freak behaviour kinda alludes to some of Jasper’s more manipulative tendencies. It’s more obvious on this page, but the way they GPS located Sunny at her work and Moon-Soo through his window instead of just sending a text really does say something about ‘em.

Actually, one last fart from last page: Why did Jasper dive through Moon-Soo’s window like that?

Peri says: Because it’s funny.

Answer one is it’s funny but that’s not the whole story. The outline had Jasper show up on Moon-Soo’s doorstep, like some kind of boring nerd. But there’s a problem, and that problem is named “literally the next page we have a whole other doorstep scene”. I’m not doing two doorstep scenes in a row. The god of interesting compositions would strike me down where I stand for such a lack of creativity. I liked Jasper turning up on the boundary of Moon-Soo’s place while he’s watching a movie with Clip, though, so if I can’t use the primary boundary between indoors and outdoors… just have to use one of the other ones.

Anyway that’s enough about page 26, let’s move on. Sitara!

Sitara is a lot less “humanoid” than the other Home Bound furries, you might notice. She’s much more Shaped. I think that’s just in the nature of birds. Somehow a lizard with boobs feels acceptable to me but a bird with boobs just ain’t right. I think it’s the legs? Like whenever a bird furry has regular human legs but painted yellow it always feels like a cheat, to me. I know what a bird looks like, pal. No way she got calves like that. And then if you’re gonna make the legs spindly, you kinda can’t just stick a human torso on top. You gotta emphasise the birdishness of the rest of the body too.

The reason I made her a bird was I didn’t want to go with another mammal in the cast. Birds were a pretty big slice of the animal kingdom that weren’t yet represented so that was the obvious pick. Next question was, what kind of bird? To come up with something there, I started with her Indian descent. In Home Bound I like to make each character’s species match their heritage. Moon-Soo is Korean, the moon bear’s distribution range overlaps with South Korea. Sunny is the only one of the cast whose species is native to Australia, so we can presume she’s also the only one who’s Indigenous Australian. Jasper and Clip are a little more ambiguous because dogs and rabbits are domesticated basically everywhere on the planet, although samoyeds are a Russian breed, so make of that what you will. 

I wanna note this is something you ought to be careful with. Like if you had a Chinese character and you made em a Panda, like, that’s kinda tacky at best. Doing some Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs type shit there. Generally here I have the advantage that there’s a second more important layer of symbolism in each character’s species aligning with their celestial motif, so the country of origin isn’t the only thing they got going on. Like the first thing you think of when you think moon bear isn’t their distribution range, it’s the bloody big moon on their chests. In Sitara’s case, yeah, the peafowl is the national bird of India. Going for the main bird of the character’s country is the kind of thing that gets you in that tacky zone, so there’s a risk there. But, really, it’s a very charismatic animal that has a well established identity beyond what part of the world it’s from, so I’m pretty sure it’s fine. 

It was a nice choice here, too. I like it when a work uses the lesser known sexually dimorphic form of an animal. Girl peafowl don’t have that brilliant blue plumage or the famous tail feathers but they do have a lovely patch of shimmering green on their neck. It was a good place to insert some star-like sparkles, too. The rest of their design is mostly just a stylisation of a peahen, she’s got a chunky stubby look with a lot of rounded shapes that complement her soft personality. Her mouth just being a cut-in on her beak fits well with the understated emotional palette Sitara operates in. She’s got big pupils, which cutens her up and has a way of dulling the intensity of her emotions, and she’s got eyelashes only on the bottom of her eyes just to give her a unique look. At this point I wanted to push my design skills a little, too, so Sitara’s whole head has a very graphic appeal to it. It’s especially 2D in its construction, blithely refusing to make sense in three dimensional space. 

Clothing wise, Sitara is a cosplayer, so she too should have a good fashion sense. I like that the cute and summery outfit offers a slight counterweight to her shyness, reminds you she contains multitudes. The tied-off top was a Peri suggestion. You can tell, because it’s the only actually good outfit I didn’t steal from Splatoon…

Peri praises: 

I’m very fond of Sitara as a character. She’s quiet and sweet, but absolutely unabashed about loving the things she loves. (Cosplay and anime! Truly, a nerd of the kind us webcomic folks can relate to XD)

It’s interesting to me that when Jasper shows up at her door, she seems more surprised than anything. Despite them being friends (and she’s also friendly with Sunny and Moon-soo, as is implied later in the comic), Jasper apparently hasn’t rung her up in four months?! And her first question is “Is there something you need?” almost like she can’t quite believe that Jasper would actually turn up just to hang out, so there has to be some other ulterior motive for it. In a way she’s not wrong, since Jasper did only arrive here after running through literally every single other option.

And yet, Jasper isn't actually being that much of a jerk. They’ve been neglecting this friendship, sure, but now that they’re here knocking on Sitara’s door it’s easy to see why the two get along. They share plenty of common interests, and Jasper’s excitement about Sitara’s crafting projects (her pride and joy!) is entirely genuine. It makes sense that they’re friends! And I love the way that Sitara starts to shine (literally!) when showing off her cosplay. There’s a certain magic to putting on a costume, especially when you’ve made it yourself, that for the right person can really bring them out of their shell. I absolutely imagine Sitara being one of those people.

I like how these disparate facts subtly paint quite a nuanced picture of the social network of Homebound. Jasper has got their two best friends in Sunny and Moon-soo, with all three of them bonded by their debate club experiences. You get the sense that Sitara used to be more enmeshed with this group, but that her soft spoken personality means that she’s often in danger of fading into the background, and that maybe this contributed to her gradually getting overshadowed in Jasper’s social circle by the more assertive debate kids. Which doesn’t mean that they are friends anymore, just that… sometimes they forget to call her for four months. And it has happened enough that she doesn’t even find it particularly weird anymore, she just opens the door and welcomes Jasper back in when they do bother to stop by.

Also can we appreciate this panel for a second? It makes me giggle every time.