Man Who Wasnt There The

Author notes

MWWT: Spaceman #1 pg10

barking_frog

on Oct. 15, 2007

Oops. Two days late. I was scrambling, over the weekend, to complete layouts for Caio for MWWT: Executive Matters #1, and felt it best to put everything else on brief hold. Sorry!


In general news…

If you use IRC you might be interested in DALnet #mwwt. It's general comics chat (webcomic or otherwise), and also (of course) MWWT comes up from time to time. ;-)

I'm offering three people an advance peek at some MWWT: EM pages in layout form, but you have to work for it. ^.^ I want some people who haven't read the script already (most of my friends have) to review a tricky seven-page multilayered bit for story flow – I'm concerned it might be hard to follow in places and want to identify them so I can smooth them out (if I can).

All I ask is that you look them over with a critical eye as far as whether action/motion/pacing is clear, and let me know if there are any places where you weren't sure what was going on, or if any of it felt off. PQ me please so the comments here don't get cluttered – I will post a comment as soon as I have three volunteers (after which you should not PQ me about it!).

I now return you to my regularly scheduled author's note:



The graffiti appearing in many of the backgrounds on the wall was painstaking to implement – not because there was anything especially difficult about drawing it, but due to poor planning on my part and the extra stages of work I had to pay as the price.

It was the plan since almost the beginning to include graffiti on the wall, but then I got the idea to include easter eggs in the graffiti. That takes time to work out, and Caio was ready to start drawing, so I told him to go ahead and draw blank walls and we'd fill the graffiti in later.

By the time I got that organized, Caio had a time problem crop up and wasn't able to fill the graffiti in unless I wanted to delay publication for another month.

Enter Federico, who was already drawing Wives and Lovers, and agreed to fill in the graffiti.

Well, we really quickly discovered we were in for it. Fede had the difficult work of figuring skew on the wall in all these panels, and then he and I had to cut anything in the foreground that would overlap the graffiti into a separate layer, lay down the graffiti, and then lay the foreground elements back down over it.

On top of that, in later pages I realized Caio had begun to collapse the distance between the doorways in the wall. The eye didn't really notice it when the wall was blank (which I'm sure is how Caio made the spatial mistake in the first place), but there simply wasn't enough room in a lot of panels to put the graffiti where it needed to go.

What to do? I dove in and spent hours and hours photoediting Caio's artwork to make the wall the right dimensions for Fede to do his job. I think I did a pretty sharp job, but of course it was impossible to make the change work 100% without actually redrawing – you can see signs of my edits in places where the path on the ground might lead up to the wall, with the doorway maybe two meters to one side. ^.^

The easter eggs? A couple of references internal to the story that'll make sense later on, and a couple of references to relevant comics or sci-fi from the period of the story or earlier. The latter shouldn't be hard to spot, and will tie in thematically with MWWT. The former's necessarily a little trickier and… well, you'll see. :-D

(There are also a few things on the wall that're nonsense, or at least nonsense to anyone but me and a couple insiders, so don't kill yourself trying to assign meaning to everything.)



DAJB: Thanks!

TheMidge28: I think we frustrate each other a bit sometimes, but the work seems the better for it.

Rutger: Thank you!