Thread "Discovered SUNE" in forum "Sune"

Posted at 6:05PM, May. 7, 2007

It is excellent and I hope it lasts long enough to tell a story. Surprised to find no discussion here. Apparently they all go on the comments box below the pages. I'll go post my quibbles there.

-Johnny A.

Posted at 8:05PM, May. 7, 2007

Glad you enjoy it. I may have slow times here and there in-between work and family, but the story will be completed. By the end of next issue we'll be close to the half-way point.

Posted at 9:05PM, May. 12, 2007

One could also say that you've passed the 1/3rd mark and are hammering away into the next chunk of the storyline, but that kind of "glass-half-full" mummering never was your strong suit *grin*

Posted at 5:05PM, May. 16, 2007

So I will post my quibbles here, after all.

Things I particularly like about Sune:

1) Very fully developed background
2) Sex and violence and story. Hard to get all three in the same place.
3) Link to Endless Winter. Yay! More story and background.

Things that annoy me about Sune:

1) Preposterous huge vacant spaceship interiors. Animators have an excuse, when they are on a budget.

-Johnny A.

Posted at 8:05PM, May. 16, 2007

I'm glad you enjoy it. The sex, violence, and story aspects are actually part of why I do it. I enjoy SF and have always been a little annoyed by, at least in film, a major imbalance in content. Either everything's all sex and violence (usually in the low-budget fare) with little story, or it's all high-minded ideals, and the sex and violence, which are no small pieces of the human animal, are glossed over or completely ignored.

The world, to me, is real. The people and the motivations come from a variety of sources. I have to know who they are and where they come from before I can start writing them. As humans, our backgrounds aren't made up as we go along, we are shaped by what has come before, and that's just as important in story telling…so I try to develop my world before I even start with the characters and their stories.

As for the art…yeah, I do go sparse at times. I'm more writer guy than artist guy. I taught myself to draw to service my writing, because I couldn't find dependable artists with which to work, but moving forward with the story as a writer is my primary interest. I spin my wheels too long on the art and I feel like I'm not progressing with the story, so I do streamline on ocassion. My art style over-all is streamlined.

That being said, however, there are other reasons behind how I approach my ship interiors.

Quill's ship, for instance (what little of it that's been seen) is more detailed than, say, Sune's ship, or Ian's, or the cruiser. From smallest to largest, the ships go Sune's, Ian's, Quill's, and the cruiser. The cruiser is actually big enough to where you could dock the other ships in its bays.

The crews aboard the cruiser, that's pretty much their home. They're aboard ship for months if not years at a time, before they may be moved to a different ship or planetside, so, some areas of the ship aside, I try to keep things open and clean, not cluttered or claustrophobic. Take the lounge area, for instance, with the giant video display. Open, calm, relaxing. But then you have some of the office areas, like where Risk Management is located, and it's a little more compact, with more stuff crammed in and more going on.

Ian's ship, the bridge has a lot going on, but the mess hall doesn't, in much the same design sense as Sune's ship. The smallest of them all, in Sune's ship, space is at a premium, so most things need to be able to retract into the walls or floors to allow for a room to serve multiple functions.

Jumping to Voltaire, in Endless Winter, the crew lives on that ship. That is their home and has been for years. I approach that ship as if it were a yacht with teeth; it's just as much in its element cruising about carrying a small group of passengers out to see some nebula as it is in combat. Though with more mass than even Quill's ship, it certainly doesn't turn on a dime. But unlike the ships of Quill, Ian, or Sune, Voltaire can sustain its crew for years without putting to port for resupply if need be.

Voltaire has decks upon decks, with upwards of a hundred different rooms (there's even a rec room with a pool in there). The asteroid belt scene about halfway into issue 2 of Endless Winter, the landing bay is only one of two bays on the underside of the ship, but if you ripped out the parking slips down the sides of that one bay, you could just about fit Sune's ship inside there.

On the other hand, Sune's ship has one deck, two large rooms (one you've seen as the armory and the other as the medical bay, though those aren't the only functions they serve), two living quarters, a small storage area, the cockpit, fore and aft engineering corridors with a couple of crawlspaces and that's about it.

In general, though, I like open and/or multifunctional areas aboard ships.

But hey, if the ships are your only real complaint thus far, then I'm doing pretty well.

Posted at 11:08AM, Aug. 30, 2007

I've been reading your comic for a while now, even back since stormchild. I like Sune's universe. It's like Lexx meets Star Wars. Your drawing style also reminds me of the one in the anime movie Metropolis, quite cartoony, more so in Endless Winter. Nevertheless you deliver well thought out and entertaining work. I'm enjoying it, thanks.
Also I like your depiction of sexual liberalism, which is a refreshing point of view from the mainstream bullshit we've been getting for so long.
But what about other aspects of human nature - drugs and entertainment? Shouldn't cyberspace have a much more present role in society by now?
And am I mistaken or are the Humans in your story pretty much ordinary most of the time? Despite the slow aging process of the 'first two' and some inbreeding of humans and aliens I've been hearing about, there's nothing physically advanced about our bodies - no psychic powers, no genetically engineered mutations, no mechanical upgrades…unless of course you're bringing a purist Christianity into the equation…
May not be the point of the story but I believe those are good points to address for the sake of broadening your universe, don't you think so, R?
Just wanted to hear your personal opinion on this.

Posted at 11:09PM, Sep. 30, 2007

I do agree with you, and things such as media, and the influence it not only has on society but how the society shapes the types of programming, are things that I'd like to address.

Touching on a couple of the other things you brought up, I dig cyberpunk, that's part of the reason characters like Lacey exist, and I'm also a big believer in genetic engineering, so we'll hear more about the Dolls, and see a wider variety of "classes" over time than just the Tiger class we've seen in characters like Evan, Cali, Nike, and K'Siurra (by way of one of her parents). Tigers are just more prominent because of their popularity as both combat and pleasure models, so they've gone through a couple of periods of overproduction.

"Normal" humans in general have become augmented, somewhat, though it's not that obvious most of the time until you see them in action, and it's nothing new, so you don't see a lot of people going up to pick someone up in a bar and saying, "so, where are your upgrades?"

There's also still a barrier in some corporate nations (like Takai-Simner) where access to certain types of technologies, whether it be genetic or cybernetic, is a matter of money and/or status. Raymond, the guy Mr. White served with in the military, had optical implants, as does Chelsea's mother, and both Bethany and Alex sport wetware ports, though they're not the only ones (just the most obvious). Most of the cybernetics you're not going to see unless someone draws attention to it or the person does something that's obviously not natural born. Not a lot of Robocop-like cyborgs, though they do exist, mostly for hazardous work and frequently in combat or security.

I would like to at some point explore what humans can do to themselves, or create genetically, just out of their pure desire to be inventive and "unique". But you wouldn't see something like that in Takai-Simner territory unless the individual was looking to be arrested and perhaps executed.

Humanity has gone through a few bumps, been knocked back a peg or four a few times, so in a lot of ways it's had to figuratively crawl back out of the caves and get a handle on itself again scientifically more than once.

Now drugs, that's something I don't deal with a lot, just from time to time. No particular reason as to why it's a rarity, though.

In the end, there are a lot of things I want to explore outside of the main thrust, though they may not all be dealt with in this story arc. But you're correct, those are all things that would better flesh out the scope of the universe.

Posted at 4:12AM, Dec. 13, 2008

Just checking in, hoping to be reassured that the hiatus is only a hiatus.

Genetic engineering offers a huge range of fascinating possibilities, but it will only happen under conditions of totalitarian government or high-end crime, because if the experimenter/artist is legally liable the thing is just too risky. In my long-runnning Traveller game, the standard introduction is "There was general agreement on the elimination of male-pattern baldness and the vermiform appendix, but there were lynchings when parents discovered that immunity to most forms of skin cancer meant that the childern would be very dark."