Yeah, I’m giving it slack because of the source material and bc I’m interested in Karolina’s coming out arc will be handled mostly. Also the casting and direction is really good and some of the changes to the storyline are intriguing. idk. If I get far enough into a season of something I generally like to finish it before writing it off because I’m a completist.

Karolina is presented as like, an isolated girl who was raised in a cult-like church who never rebels in this version, so when Gert loses it (for reasons I can’t remember) and calls her “cult girl” or something like that she fires back with “annoying social justice warrior!” and…it strikes me as something a teen raised in the sitch Karolina was would say. So while it annoyed me it didn’t feel untrue to, you know, teenagers. It’s the other stuff surrounding it that bothers me more. 

i have NOT seen hudson hawk. i would be glad to take it on next. i am DYING for a needlessly bizarre movie. i have accumulated a good number of good news movies i will add to the next edition. exciting stuff :)

ok i’ve been sitting on this question for 16 days bc it was sent right before i had to leave on a very long trip and it deserved a more detailed answer than i could afford it at the time. thank you for waiting! i am going to write a lot more words than i should bc i dont really get to talk about how the sausage is made. i dont talk about this kind of stuff a lot because all of my knowledge and fumbling attempts to make a comic comes from a place of complete and utter ignorance of the genre, medium and the tools i use. i hope by writing things about the process, people who want to make webcomics feel more at ease knowing that no one knows what the hell they are doing.

first things first: here’s a secret about the creation process of AGS. the soft shading of the comic is entirely because every time i do cel shading it looks like total shit. i have absolutely no aptitude for it even now. when i first started AGS i had no skill at soft shading either, but i could do slightly more interesting moody things with it pulling from media i had grown up with. i grew up watching a lot of old movies on turner classic movies, so a lot of the aesthetics demonstrated by directors that worked in a grey scale medium really stuck with me. i loved the noirs (welles was really good at this kind of work, especially in “the lady from shang-hai” and “touch of evil”)  that used heavy shadows to obfuscate and set the tone of a scene or imply the motivations of a character. these movies and old twilight zone episodes (which i think still stand as really spectacular triumphs in use of grey scale contrast to invoke an unnerving atmosphere) represent the kind of imagery i want to pull from in my comic, when its busy not being a screwball comedy of errors.

the line work inspiration is another thing where it was just kind of what my body was able to produce. it’s not something i tried to consciously cultivate, its just kind of how things wound up. the comics i grew up reading probably influenced me the most. i think a lot of kids who make comics now grew up reading their parent’s comic collections and for me that was “bloom county”, “calvin and hobbes”, “the far side” and, later in my adolescence when i started reading comics on my own, “sam and max”. 

i went through the anime influence pre-teen years and that has definitely stuck around in some ways. i also grew up in that time where cartoon network had the rights to air looney tunes cartoons and my favorites were the chuck jones and tex avery shorts. i never really set out to be like “i want a cartoony style” and if i had my way i would be drawing in a semi-realistic painterly style, but this is what i’ve adapted into so im trying to do it the best i can. purcell draws backgrounds the way i wish i could.