Author notes

063 - Professional Courtesy

El Cid

on April 12, 2016

I took my own advice and didn't do a diagram thingee for Nina's bazooka arm like I did for the arm blade thing. But for those of you who just love punishment, here's the original with all the extra crap on it.



You might also notice there's a lot of extra text gobbledygook on there. Well, there's a story behind that. A story of shame, and betrayal…



As some of you may know, Gman003 is really the brains behind this operation. He's my official unofficial science consultant, and thanks to him this comic is a lot smarter than I am.



When I conceptualized this action sequence, I thought it would be a neat idea to have Nina's CPU readouts running through the panels. So I asked Gman if he could write me some authentic-sounding cyborg code for Nina's crazy cool cyborg stuff. Well, he went above and beyond the call of duty on this one, and actually came up with his own Unix-based programming language for Nina's operating system, and gave me reams of awesome code that I could use. He even researched anatomical stuff like how much volume the human heart pumps per beat, and sprinkled it with sly in-jokes and pop cultural references. Here's a sample:



As you can imagine, I was blown away. I couldn't wait to inject all that liquid awesome into my comic, and wrote him as much:



Aaaaand… as you can see… I didn't end up using very much of it. Yeah. I sort of went through a paradigm shift as I was putting the actual pages together and realized that less was actually more in this case, and the panels didn't need diagrams and computer code and whatnot explaining everything. That all just clutters up the page and messes up the flow. So I decided to use less cybercode gobbledygook and let the pictures do more of the talking.

I feel pretty bad about not using all of Gman's awesome computer code, but I'm still going to use some of hit, here and there. And it was a helpful learning experience. So I hope Gman isn't too annoyed with me for not using more of his contributions here. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, but it just didn't survive the final cut.

And, as an aside, I'm shocked and amazed that 'gobbledygook' actually didn't set off spellcheck.