Teknobabble

Last one. Honest.

So as election results started rolling in tonight, I decided to have fun and do some “Cybertron votes” images as I was watching the results, to occupy myself.

As the evening began to take shape in a way I was hoping wouldn’t take shape, I found myself doing more just to throw myself into a distraction while still following the election.

And by evening’s end end, yeah. Reality sunk in and I kinda couldn’t keep going save for that final Megatron Origin homage.

BT Toons: Extinction XX

20 pages in; crazy. And most of them are all new pages that weren’t in the original 24 hour comic, either.

Some direct callbacks here too to an old old storyarc.

Will hopefully have a Tuesday page next week given I already know what it’s gonna be (my main concern having been “I’ll be out of town until Monday”); I just need to draw it.

Also, hey, enjoy the layout tweaks! Having a bigger monitor made me reevaluate layout size given how tiny everything looks now, so hereon out future comics are all getting uploaded at 700px widths while old ones are being upscaled.

BT Toons: Extinction XIX

Oh, what an overly tangled web I tend to weave.

In off-topic tidbits, meanwhile:

MP 27 (the new Masterpiece Hot Rod) is awesome.

“House of Cards” S4 is great.

Robert Sawyer’s latest, “Quantum Night”, is fantastic and I couldn’t put it down.

“Fuller House” is surprisingly something I watched.

Virtual Console Pokemon Blue takes precedence over everything. Except watching TV shows because it’s really easy to play that game while watching shows.

BT Toons: Extinction XVIII

FINALLY THIS THING IS WRITTEN.

Seriously, this thing ended up being a headache to finish given the artwork was pretty much done Wednesday night, and then I started poking holes in my original script concept for it.

Stan Lee was super lucky he had Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko pages to write a plot for rather than my own.

BT Toons: Extinction XVII

Page 17 already? Wow; geez.

The crazy part is that I’ve only used about 6 pages or so from the original comic. A few got cut here and there, but I’m only at the page 11 material all the same… ha.

Apologies this took until Saturday, but I do have half a good reason which ends on an awesome note – namely, my monitor problems got progressively worse throughout the week until it just didn’t work, period.

So I went “crap, I need a new monitor” and instead of just replacing my 27″, sunk some money into a brand new 32″  2560×1440 display. Which is a resolution I have not had the pleasure to work on since 2009… during the period this story was originally drawn; huh. Wow.

Anyway huge monitors are great.

BT Toons: Fillertime: Valentines 2

More of me playing around with artstyle. And helmets. (All of which, yes, I do actually own.)

Also more of me being late with the update I was originally drawing to post by Valentine’s Day. Which was yesterday. And today’s almost done.

Anyway, Deadpool was pretty great so yeah. Just need to decide if I want to go see it again tomorrow on cheap Tuesday given a) Agent Carter has two episodes tomorrow and b) new Flash tomorrow as well.

Oh, and also, Gravity Falls is now over, finished! Fantastic finale to a fantastic oft-hiatused show.

So I got on a bit of a Twitter rant re: comics pricing and value for money earlier tonight. Which prompted this blogpost of mine.

BT Toons: Extinction XVI

Wait, what’s this? An on-time update? Noooooooo.

So as for director’s commentary on THIS strip, it’s all related to the last panel, and how this comic is the only real vestige of a concept I came up with way back when.

I’d already established well before this that Nya had a character in the MMO – specifically, one with armor patterned after the Insecticon Shrapnel (the username being the punny Shrapnyal). A short while after Breeze got introduced to the comic, and in an example of organic character interactions just happening, ended up becoming somewhat chummy with Nya and Samus; the three of them interacting in the coffee shop Breeze worked at. The mutual “wanting to get back at Tornado” drawing the bratty based-on-Asajj Ventress-sister and mercenary cat together, and adding Samus to the trio only made sense given how I write her.

So around when I was doing this comic I got the idea in my head that they should all be a mercenary MMO team, ALL patterned after Insecticons – dubbed the “Waywards”, in tribute to Transformers fandom member/”Insecticomics” creator Wayward (her now-ended photocomic was a fun one indeed; she’s still doing other fanworks but not that particular anything-goes Insecticon comic). And thus as a result we got the designs for Blowback (Breeze; get the pun?) and Bombelle (Samus, with a morph ball bomb reference intended there).

Sadly I didn’t really get much mileage out of the concept; not long after I used them in this 24 hour comic, I did the Dark Fission storyline and kinda deliberately closed off that MMO plotline for a bit (which ended up being for WAY longer than I’d originally intended; seriously, I was already plotting the Deej/Cicada-Chan introduction/reveal at least a year before I even finalized Deej’s design!)

It’s also worth noting as well re: character relationships that, this being well before Deej met Breeze in person, and given how she uses an alias, this whole Breeze = Blowback thing would have been unknown to both of them until the trial. (Nya, on the other hand, she may well have known of, given she’s a known quantity in mercenary/assassin circles IRL and isn’t all that subtle about her particular set of skills.)

BT Toons: Extinction XV

That’s right; second update this week on account of working out pretty clearly where I’m going next storywise and wanting to get this out there. (In fact, I’ve already got a head start on next week’s update!)

For those keeping score at home, this page is pretty heavily edited artwise-  the top 2/3rds are the original artwork rearranged around the page (the first panel was actually the last, for instance), while the bottom third I just drew  and inked tonight.

BT Toons: Extinction XIV

Running late with the update this week, on account of needing to retool. The storyline edits basically neutered this entire subplot once it got to this point, so I had to rethink and eventually concede that yes, I needed to draw new pages.

(Hell, I’ve got a LOT more new pages that’ll get drawn when all’s said and done, given my current mapping. Which is why you should never make what’s a weaker story a canonical foundation.)

But hey, I’ve got direction for it now so woohoo.

BT Toons: Extinction XIII

Well this was an unintentionally late update, and a stark reminder of why I don’t Marvel Method much anymore. (Except, of course, on 24 hour comics, but those are a pretty different beast.)

Knowing what you want the strip to convey, but struggling to figure out how to convey it is a pain that results in sitting in front of a screen for a few hours in frustration. And then you throw out the original dialogue concept, go with a VERY different conversation than initially conceived, and end up with a clearer picture of where stuff’s going, so woohoo now.

It’s nuts just how much this story is changing as I retell it; in the end I suspect most of this is gonna end up being new material. Hell, I’m on page 13 of a 24 page comic and I haven’t printed the 9th page yet,  while I’ve dropped other preexisting pages.

As for the contents of this comic itself, meditations on godhood/responsible application of power/liberty vs controlled are something I’ve been doing for ages, and the subject continues to fascinate me. No system is perfect; for every point there is a counter point, and it’s fun to construct ideologies for characters based around their worldviews/experience.

BT Toons: Extinction XII

Getting back into the swing of these hand-drawn pages at last. After all, I need to wrap this before I get back to the present day.

And yep, that’s two pop culture references snuck in there.

Sucks too that the Beast Machines font I use for Scorchbert 45 doesn’t really bold that well in Photoshop. But ah well.

EDIT: And it looks like my latest bevy of updates broke stuff. Investigating WTF is up; hopefully I’ll fix it asap.

BT Toons: Anachronistic Entropy

That’s right! At LONG LAST, I’ve finally deigned to post a new comic update!

…and really, I don’t have much of an excuse for the long delay. A mix in not getting around to drawing new pages + Heroes of the Storm + Star Wars Battlefront + SO MUCH GOOD TV ON THESE DAYS.

Hell, not even doing a quick Christmas doodle this year is depressing as hell to think about.

As is pretty evident in this update, too, I’ve been playing around with artstyle. Actually goes back further than my last hiatus; I’m not sure how much is going to immediately migrate into the comic yet.

Also evident here is that this isn’t a Wednesday update, but a Tuesday one. Which is purely a case of me looking back at how the original intent of moving updates to Wednesday/Saturday for the sake of planning around my shows ended up actually doing nothing to help my productivity.

For now, the aim is to do consistent Tuesday updates. And then go from there.

BT Toons: Fillertime 2015 – 24 hour comic

So yeah, I’ll be doing this 24 hour comic thing I usually do this weekend tomorrow, over at Happy Harbor Comics.

As per usual, the event is being used as a fundraiser benefit for Boys & Girls Clubs/Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Edmonton.

More info can be found here: http://happyharborcomics.com/events/24HRComic/2015/page_event_24hrcomic15.shtml