Author notes

240 - Incoming

El Cid

on Aug. 6, 2018

So, if you haven't been following the animated series from the beginning, this sequence probably makes no sense at all to you. There's a full recap on page 225, but to sum it up in a nutshell: The VR sunbathing babe (whom you may or may not recognize) is operating some sort of charter service flying space tourists to Enceladus. Our protagonist (“James”) has gone deep into Enceladus' subsurface ocean in search of a mysterious – and valuable – glowing green artifact. Unfortunately, he's been captured by the creepy crawlies who protect said artifact, and our curvy captain here made it clear to him that the clock was ticking on his fare. His time is now up, and he hasn't made it back. So now this is happening. That's the gist of what you're seeing here.



AUTHOR'S NOTES



* The Diablo is the name of the freightship operated by Captain Savage and her crew. As we've seen, they are having some complications presently.

I had a horrendous weekend. Well okay, that's actually not true, but insofar as comics-related stuff, it was pretty awful. My video card decided to go on strike, and the screen on my laptop was fritzing out. I seem to have gotten everything back under control, but now when I go back and look at all my art, it all looks super dark. I can't tell if it's just because I need to calibrate my monitor after all this messing around with my video card, or if my screen's right now and it was bad before… and all this time, I've just been posting unsightly dark artwork and not knowing about it. So, if this page looks extra bright, it's because I color corrected it with my now-much-darker monitor settings. I'll eventually look into getting this thing calibrated.

Also, I've been playing around with rendering in Poser rather than the usual software I render with. It's got a much more photorealistic rendering engine that what I currently use, and it looks like I can produce some pretty decent art with it if I take the time to learn how to use it. Here's a test render I did just screwing around with a panel from an earlier page (with boring default textures):



Unfortunately, it's a lot slower to render in Poser. The above image took twice as long to produce as the Carrara version I used for this comic… and the comic version was like four times its size. So this would at best be something I could use for pinup work; if I tried to do a whole comic this way it would take me two weeks to do a page!

See ya later!