Author notes

Strip XXVII: Where's Levana?

J_Scarbrough

on Jan. 25, 2023

Well, this was certainly a difficult and challenging page/strip to do - especially with my antiquated process. . . .

I don't use a tablet - literally never touched one in my life (and I sure as hell can't afford no $4000 apparatus). Believe it not, much of the comic is done using old-school methods and techniques: on paper, penciled and inked by hand. Only after that does the digital process come into play: scan, clean up, edit, color, etc. Not only that, but with Season 2, I've made the process even more complicated on myself . . . you see, I have a very painstakingly detailed art style, which I've always found challenging to compromise into traditional comic pages; as a kid, I used to make "comic books" where, instead of each page containing multiple panels to tell the story, each and every individual panel was its own page, so they were kind of like picture book/comic book hybrids. This is the approach I have taken with Season 2: almost all of the panels were drawn on entire pieces of paper, finalized as separate image files, and then imported and resized into the comic page template(s) I had created.

What made this particular strip particularly challenging was I sort of had to approach it almost as though this were animation. For example, you will notice the first four panels all take place in the same frame, but only the foreground action changes - so, rather than redraw the same background four separate times, the background was drawn and finalized separately, then merely copied and pasted into the template four times; after that, the characters and their actions were drawn separately, but after they were colored, the white space had to be removed to save and edit the images as transparent PNGs before they could be imported into the template - in a sense, turning them into digital animation cels. And, of course, using the background itself as a guideline and reference, that was how I was able to position these digital cels with precision accuracy to keep them in their proper places panel by panel. Similarly, you will notice in the last panel, Saul and Paul are disappearing into thin air with Levana . . . that too was accomplished with separate background and foreground image files (and, in Saul and Paul's case, some edge feathering and fading as well).

This was actually the first of several pages/strips to come that had to be constructed in such a manner - they were incredibly tedious and time-consuming, not to mention taxing and difficult (now you see why I've been working on this so far in advance), but I hope they will pay off in the end . . . I'm sure you'll be able to tell what other upcoming pages/strips were completed in this manner.

One other note about Saul and Paul . . . whenever I create a story centered around a particular subject matter I'm not entirely familiar with, I will do as much research into the lore as I can to further educate myself, and to ensure I'm being as accurate as possible . . . but, anything I could turn up about teleportation was inconclusive, if not altogether nonexistent, other than, "It was just a TWILIGHT thing." So, if this inaccurate, I apologize for that. I'm just trying to tell a story here.

next week:
This is getting quite uncomfortable.