Commentary: Page 11-12

Page 011 - Omnibenevolence 

This page is the first appearance of the Goddess of Love – and the only appearance of this particular design for her:

I really didn’t like this first effort. Mainly because of the outfit. It’s just a bikini! That’s not very Goddess-ish. I really drew a blank on what she should look like here; I was gradually approaching something, and in the finalised design you’ll find I kept the blue parts here, that sheer silken fabric floating around her. Her ears were meant to look like dog ears, but as it turns out it’s really hard to visually distinguish pointy dog ears and cat ears in a vacuum, and I stylised her hair differently in future appearances just because this more complex look, while suitably deific, turned out to be too time consuming to draw.

The Goddess looked pretty realistic on this page. At the time I considered this a bit of a failure, because I didn’t want her to look real, I wanted her to look anime stylised! At this point in Foreach I was actually pretty heavily using myself as a model when drawing poses like this. If you’ve ever admired Helen’s butt on page 7, know that’s MY butt you’re checking out. I’m essentially built like an anime girl, so it was especially appropriate for use in this sequence when I was a lot less confident in my anatomy skills. At the time I had a fullbody height mirror stood right next to my workstation, which was a very useful tool for reference and learning. When it was warm I would often strip totally down when I was working to get a proper full anatomical reference! This is a fact that Peri has made fun of me extensively for.

Peri’s Thoughts: 

Hey, isn’t that what friends are for? :3

Anyway, as a result of working so closely to a reference to get the anatomy right, the Goddess here ended up looking a lot less… stylised than I was hoping for. She looks like a real woman, which is a bit of a problem, because she shouldn’t be! She was meant to look more like an idealised symbol of womanhood – an anime girl – than anything real. Regardless of my authorial intent here, the effect here was something a number of readers liked and thought was intentional– including Peri! 

In future appearances Peri really encouraged me to retain the more realistic look of the Goddess here. We had a little bit of back and forth on that, though. At that point my style had drifted to something a lot more graphical with bodies composed of smooth curved lines and clean shapes instead of the more complex volumes that the Goddess was composed of here. Trying to draw her with the body she appears with here in pages where she appears in multiple panels would have taken a long, long time, and I wanted to be efficient with my time. In the end we reached a point we were both happy with, where I still drew her with those simpler stylised shapes, but I emphasised giving her a little more weight around the middle and drew her with a little more detail around the tummy.

Peri’s Thoughts: 

Alright, buckle up folks, because I have a lot of thoughts on this!

First off, let’s death-of-the-author this. (Sorry Lum, I promise to resurrect you in a few minutes.) There are a lot of things I really like about this panel as the Goddess’ introduction just as it stands on its own. As previously pointed out, the Goddess in this panel is drawn very realistically, almost shockingly so. I love it specifically because of that juxtaposition with the expected anime style. After all, Lovebomb is supposed to evoke trashy harem anime, but it is ultimately a subversion of the genre. Having the Goddess of Love appear as a realistically proportioned human woman plays into that perfectly. It catches the reader off guard–I remember when this page was first posted, we got readers commenting along the lines that they “hadn’t expected the Goddess to have JRPG final boss vibes”–and hints that there is something more going on here beneath the surface.

Secondly, I love that this depiction gives the Goddess a believably trans body. Of course, trans bodies can look just about any way, shape, or form! In this particular depiction, the realistic anatomy (especially the smaller breasts) and particular choice of posing work (what’s going on in the crotch region? None of your business!) together to make me go, “Damn, that heavenly HRT really is something, ain’t it?” Astute readers were already picking up by Chapter 2 that there was a metaphorical connection between Jasper (soon to be Coral) and the Goddess, and given their own journey of gender discovery it feels especially fitting that the ultimate depiction of Femininity and Love in Coral’s paradise dimension would reflect her own trans identity.

And then there are a few more small things to recommend this design to me. First, the Goddess’ body here reminds me of depictions of Venus and other love goddesses in classical art. Not quite “rubenesque”, but closer to that end of the spectrum than most anime goddesses, and I like that fact. And finally, I like seeing a woman who isn’t fashion-model-thin get to strut her stuff in a skimpy outfit and present herself as an ideal of beauty! It’s always a good day for body positivity.

Okay, let’s un-death-of-the-author Lum now, and I’ll chime in on some of their specific comments. Character model complexity is absolutely a major concern when it comes to webcomic characters that will need to be drawn and redrawn many times over. The future evolution of the goddess’ design towards a simpler, more-anime style is in large part a response to those needs. However, within those constraints there are still aspects of this original design that I’ve leaned on Lum to preserve–most notably her small breasts and her tummy chub. We’ll probably talk about this more during her appearances in Chapter 3, but I feel that it’s been a mixed outcome on that front. Unfortunately, the anime style really does seem to have a gravitational potential well that slowly draws character designs back to more cartoonish babydoll forms over time, which I think has been somewhat to the detriment of the Goddess’ presentation. Ah well! Webcomics are a marathon and not a sprint, and some allowances have to be made.

Oh, but that reminds me of one other thing that comes up fairly often in ForEach’s art! As Lum noted, this panel is much more detailed than they can afford to put into every panel. These “high effort panels” happen quite a bit when they are introducing a new character or establishing a new environment. But the magic of comicking is that you don’t need to reproduce that same level of detail on every subsequent panel. Once the readers see the more intricate “establishing shot” once, the artist can just hint at those details later on and the readers will typically autofill the rest mentally. (Lum does this all the time with backgrounds! And sometimes even with game display elements–I’ll point out another example of that in just a few pages.) So even though the Goddess’ design is simplified in her later appearances there is no cognitive dissonance, and the reader simply assumes that the simplified form is representing the more detailed form shown here.

That’s enough about the goddess. Let’s discuss her Temple!

The Isle of Hollidae has a pretty Mediterranean vibe, so it’s only natural that the Goddess’ temple looks very greek. And wouldn’t you know it, the seashell motif returns here! The Goddess has a big association with water and the sea, as with her real world (is that the right term here?) inspirations of Aphrodite and Venus. This was naturally Rhys’ idea! He’s pretty smart like that. The water association had plot relevance in the end, but in the early ideation of Foreach it really was just a motif to be shared with Love Bomb as a whole. I think we intended for Jasper/Coral to have a water motif going on, too. Make of that what you will.

Peri’s Thoughts: 

Another detail I love on this page is the way Jiro seems to literally suck the color out of the room around him. Panel 2 is such a lovely transition, with Jiro emerging from the shadows around him (matching panel 1 above) into the pink glow of the Goddess’ presence (matching panel 3 below!) Now that’s some good composition!

And we’ve barely talked about the writing yet! Lots of great details on this page. The way the Goddess swings between cherubic nonsense and sounding like a game tutorial dump. The mention of both the beach volleyball and the hot springs–two elements that come up again in the future! We even get our first hint to the effect that it is a Bad Thing to make the Goddess cry… (keep your eyes on that one!) 

Ultimately, this page is the first where we see the central thematic conflict of ForEach spring to life–that of the problems created by people’s conflicting needs. The Goddess here, as Coral’s demiurge (a term which to date has not appeared in the comic, but which we use behind the scenes when writing and planning Themes) has created a place that perfectly serves her desire to be loved and to remove all conflict between those whom she loves. And in doing so, she has created a literal hell on earth for Jiro. In this scene, the conflict of their world views gets laid out explicitly through the dialogue, which helps the reader recognize the pattern when it shows up in more unspoken ways between the Little Angel and the Bastard, between Cliff and Major Mercy, and between Coral and Rex (which we have already seen, but don’t yet have the context to understand how Rex represent Cliff's desires!) As the first “game within a game” the reader is introduced to, Lovebomb functions as the template which the reader can use to interpret the rest as the games go deeper.

Page 012 - Magic Mirror

I remember regretting the name of this page. It’s so bland! I like when the page titles sound really cool or fun, like they got a ring to them. “Lum,” you might be thinking. “The page titles are only visible in the archive and in the tab name. 90% of your readers will not even register this.” To which I respond, well maybe you SHOULD be registering it, you ungrateful fools! Geeeez.

This is the first page in the comic without any dialogue in it. That might sound like an idle bit of trivia, but it carries a fair bit of significance. Before I started Foreach I decided it would not have any narration; there’s textboxes to communicate dialogue outside of panels, but going as far as to have a narrator just didn’t feel very videogames. It’s a very unique format, but it naturally comes with more restrictions! One of these is the narrative content able to be delivered by pages heavily varies on how much the action can be condensed into dialogue. Pages where nobody speaks, or where all of the action is so physical it cannot be communicated by dialogue, are less able to communicate things happening than dialogue heavy pages.Unique problem to have!

I’m usually pretty tight about the panel budget. Webcomics are a marathon, not a sprint, so solutions that involve “just working harder” are really not solutions at all. Hard Work is a racket, it will break your body and it will break your spirit, so in a long term endeavour like this you need to always be cognizant of your limits. In Foreach, I go by the rule of thumb that each page can manage about 8 panels of content. That lets me split up the pages into batches on weekends: 2 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon on both Saturday and Sunday (and during the week I have a full time job, so I like to take it easy after work). This is only a rule of thumb, though, some pages may have more or less panels depending on what the scene calls for, and some panels may take more or less work depending on what’s in them.

In addition to this is my soft rule about pacing that has emerged as I have worked on the comic for longer and longer. I follow a law that on every page of Foreach, something has to happen. And that’s a whole something, not half or a quarter. If there’s a conversation, it’s the whole thing, and by the end the plot has to have progressed by one tangible unit. I can’t have a page where characters just reiterate things already known, or have half a discussion on what’s going on, or so on. I need some kind of progression to actively occur. It just feels right! Fortunately for me, not all somethings are created equal. This page is a great example, 7 panels no dialogue but it still manages to deliver a pretty massive reveal.

Let’s talk more about the page proper. Very early on in the ideation of Foreach, the role of Love Bomb would have been played by, like, a utopian sci-fi puzzle game. The idea of including a fantasy game in the mix just totally did not occur to me at first, I think because the premise requires there to be videogames in the setting, which are traditionally not what one associates with wizards and swords and all that. When I did decide it to be a western fantasy JRPG the question of how to incorporate videogames into the setting naturally must be answered. Fortunately, as long as there are wizards in the setting, no worldbuilding problem is unsolvable.

Magic in fantasy settings tends to be carefully constructed and constrained such that it results in the exact combination of aesthetics and conveniences that the author desires from the setting. Maybe we want instantaneous travel across continents, but we still want horseback messengers to exist for tension. Maybe we want nature mages sprouting forests from nothing, but we still want a large peasant population and a feudal aesthetic. So, what magic can do and who can use it is defined in order to not “break the setting”. With this in mind, there’s really no reason why videogames couldn’t exist in a setting with wizards in it, even if most fantasy stories aren’t much interested in exploring that particular avenue.

Jiro’s controller here is a PS2 controller. Just, straight up. My initial plans here were for the magic mirror to have a similarly ornate and mystical looking controller. Something smooth, gilded, that wouldn’t look out of place in the court of an elven queen. The thing is, though, this is a pivotal scene in the narrative, and it is absolutely mission critical that the audience understands what’s happening here. Any amount of abstraction from the base concepts we’re working with risks the audience losing the thread that Jiro is playing a videogame here. It might have been cool if the game was controlled with a harp instead, from a worldbuilding standpoint, but then some section of the audience might not follow what’s happening here.

Fortunately, the PS2 controller is way way funnier than some kind of elven magical instrument. There’s a delightful contrast between it and everything else in the setting. I specifically went with the PS2 and not something more modern because the contrast there is even greater, newer controllers tend to be very sleek and clean, but this chunky looking motherfucker looks like it came out of a completely different story. Making the first big twist in the story function as a punchline, I think, really enhances the impact of it. There’s a greater emotional range being explored here, you’re not just intrigued, you’re also delighted. A lot of stories treat comedy as something outside of storytelling, maybe to break up tension, but I think you should think of comedy as just another tool. There’s a lot of ways you can use it! This is something I am absolutely going to talk more about in future.

Peri’s Thoughts: 

AAAA! A page with no dialogue! What’s an editor to DO?!

In truth, for this page, not a whole lot. Lum had a clear vision for this page, and executed on it pretty directly. However, this is actually the beginning of a sequence of several pages with no dialogue, and as they progressed I subsequently found my role as editor shifting and expanding. It turns out that being a comic editor involves a lot more than just proofreading the words in a comic, and around this upcoming set of pages is when I started to grow into the role more fully–but I’ll talk about this more when we get to Hellfuck!

There are a number of things I love about this particular page being entirely silent. I think the silence really sells just how heavily Jiro’s depression weighs on him. The first shot is night time–we’ve only seen a few short scenes, but already an entire day has passed, and we get the sense of just how much putting on the cheerful front for the girls all day has exhausted him. Left to his own devices he says nothing at all, and you get the sense that every bit of dialogue we’ve seen from him so far has been a chore, something conjured through great effort for the benefit of the people around him. His house is depressingly spare–a bedroll, a chest (for clothes presumably), and his gaming mirror. Literally nothing else. Girlypop ain’t doing so great, and we can see it plain as day without him saying a word.

And then: then game controller gag. I literally guffawed out loud the first time I saw it, and I knew it was coming! I’m with Lum 100% that it’s the juxtaposition of serious beats and humor in ForEach that make both hit harder.

Also, can we take a moment to appreciate how good the drawing Lum did of Jiro’s hands holding the controller is? It’s really good. I mean, I assume it’s because Lum has lots of experience looking at their own hands while gaming. But still, hands are hard! And these are some good hands.