#fillertime

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.

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.