Comic Sketches: November 2023 - January 2024

They said it couldn't be done. They all said it would never happen again. Yet here am I, prevailing over life's many trials and tribulations, coming directly into your houses and into your computer screen to deliver you ANOTHER comic commentary, two months in a row. Everybody... please clap. THE 1ST STILL COUNTS OKAY.

Anyway. Hi, everyone! I got my schedule on track this month, despite being hit with a nasty cold this very week, which is a huge victory and means that you get another round of sketches and all that other good stuff. Let's get into it and finally move on from post-Incursion. I can't stand to look at Edolon's smug little face anymore.

Another one of those highly rare and coveted Austin boards! As you can see, Necron's grand entrance originally played out VERY differently. The reason we ended up reworking it was twofold: One, we felt that while Edolon getting run over by Necron's truck would have been absolutely hilarious, that wasn't really the tone we were going for with the scene. We're at the stage of continuously building him up as a major threat, and that would undermine his scary factor a bit too much. Second, we were getting a little tired of such an intensive segment at this point and no one enjoys drawing big complicated vehicles (unless you're some sort of freak). We already have Oricka's mech here, it's more than enough tech for a single scene!

Besides, we could very easily condense all that action without needing to bring even more characters like The Boys over there into play. So, Ciro ended up making some adjustments to that initial idea:

Simple, effective and tonally consistent. You'll notice that we got much farther into the scene, with a reduced amount of total panels to boot. Plus, no big complicated establishing shot! That, my friends, is the most important art policy of all when it comes to sequential, long-form projects: Work Smarter, Not Harder.

The following sketches are also Ciro's lovely work!

Edolon is looking stanced up over here, but unfortunately he's looking the wrong way. Whoops! The direction characters are facing is one of our most consistent fixes, because they're really very easy to slip you by when you're in the thick of it. Some very minor adjustments during finalization and we flipped him around to face the right way, since Hayyan and the others had been previously established to be on the right side of the screen in this scene. 180 degree rule, everyone! It's very important.

It's Necron bustin' through! Of course he's gonna be a part of the actions, who do you think he is? As a follow through on the earlier panel's edits, we also ended up changing some things about how the characters were positioned, just to make sure things still made sense.

It turns out that these two gunslingers couldn't have more different approaches to the handling of their firearms, to everyone's surprise. Someone save Hayyan from Necron's lack of trigger discipline.

Gosh darn, this man will NOT stay down. Someone needs to intervene. What are they putting in those Harbinger cafeteria meals these days??? Unfortunately for our daring heroes, an extra freak is about to join the fray...

Some more Austin boards! As you can tell, those first two panels of Edolon ended up being incorporated into that last batch of sketches. The other ones ended up staying much the same in the final version, so we didn't feel the need for any touch ups, though we did add an extra panel of Pozzol tossing Sabine and Raurou in the mix just to add further clarity of action. Next sketches were done by Diz:

Man, Kheparia really does give the best tits to her least deserving wrestlers. At least his dialogue is always a blast! Can't deny how fun it is to read him when he's not being a complete abusive asshole. Pozzol may be a downright awful troll being, but he IS pretty funny.

Some slight panel edits here, mostly to keep Raurou and Sabine being carried on the same side from panel to panel and embiggening Necron to make the perspective a bit more solid.

I'm very fond of all the taunting battle dialogue being flung around in this scene. Just the slightest bit of cheese, perhaps, but who doesn't love a good cheese topping on the right scene? Again, I must reiterate: Vast Error is my favorite anime.

We made a few adjustments to Pozzol's pose here too, mostly to make him look a little more relaxed and because it felt more natural to have his body fully turned towards Edolon while they were talking to each other.

Enough about this guys, though. It's time for the BEST LITTLE JESTER OF ALL TIME!!!

Yaaaay we love Talald! Pay no mind to the struggling kidnapped victim tied above her head. I had the pleasure of finalizing this panel and it was a blast to figure out the BG and the color palette we'd be using for the cheery Talald proximity aura, as it were.

This was an unused extra panel that didn't make it into the comic, because the idea was for the [S] to start with Talald throwing Turnin down and that information sort of got lost in the sauce somewhere along the way. Internal miscommunication, it happens to the best of us. But now you get to see it!

And for the moment we've all been waiting for............ let's turn our frowns upside down! :D

This is the last bit of Austinado boards you'll be seeing for a while, so appreciate it while you can. Really take those doodles in. I think the Talald animation was one of the first things that Austin came up with when planning out this scene and it pretty much staying the same as we were working on it. You'll notice that most of these shots are pretty one-to-one with what showed up in comic! Our maestro really nailed it in one go. We saw the vision, we made it happen.

And here's the first pass of Ciro's sketches for the [S]! I think the hyper realistic monkey was probably my favorite thing that Talald pulled out of her hammer-space hair. It's always a blast to come up with new Looney Tunes shit for her to pull off when she's on screen.

Is Talald secretly the most powerful reality bending character in Vast Error? Hmmm... much to consider.

Animations like these are always a team effort, so I cannot pass this one by without shouting out our resident programmer, animator and jack-of-all trades Victoria for putting it together so masterfully. The little trick of clicking through the panels to get different dialogue boxes sure is neat, huh? It's the same idea behind a few of the pages from Murrit's crafting section; everything in a single big clickable box made to look like the regular site interface.

We also figured that switching back to the "real world" palette on that last shot of Turnin would be a good way to transition into the rest of the scene while also making the contrast between Talald's doodle-mode a bit starker. Double duty, baby.

And yeah, Talald's had Pyro vision this whole time. There's something wrong with her!!!!!! Perhaps one day in the future we will figure out exactly what it is.

At least she doesn't think she's actually hurting anyone...?

These boards were penned by yours truly! And the upcoming sketches too. Kind of a simple sequence really, but I do enjoy working on shots where I get to focus on expressions and body language foremost, so this was a nice little treat.

I really like the idea that Edolon is begrudgingly fond of Talald but still a little embarrassed by her antics, so I tried to channel that into his expression. Ugh, not in front of our cool enemies... you're harshing his vibe.

The Talald-vision style background that I originally planned didn't end up looking as good as I wanted, and we also wanted to establish some continuity with the very last shot of Turnin, so in the end I ended up just ditching it and adding the little bouncy heads instead. I think they turned out real cute, so not really a loss in my book!

Don't you just hate it when no meat crayons? :(

This trio here is like a comedy troupe to me. Their energies clash so much with each other, it's fascinating to put them all in the same space and see what comes out. Usually, some very funny lines! It was also fun to work out the subtle shifts in Pozzol's stance between panels, I had to put a little bit of my dormant animation training into action. This Man is Shocked at the Audacity of this Clown.

I'm afraid we all must admit that Necron's disguise really wasn't very good at all. He tried, bless his heart, but that banana mask wasn't doing its job properly concealing his face. On the other hand, it's not like the Harbingers are playing fair with their predictive probability shtick, either. There's just no winning with these bozos!

No sketches for these panels because I just free-styled them. The point of inspiration were those flashes of probabilities we see just before Incursion, only with Gaiaeon and Kheparia colors. To be honest, I think I could have done a bit of a better job with the green one, but oh well! They can't all be perfect. I do love how the team evil one turned out, though.

Boy, this Edolon sure loves to monologue. We get it, you're evil and you have schemes. Give it a rest, bub.

Yeah, it's The Pose. We HAD to use it eventually, don't look at me like that.

Hey speaking of looking, Pozzol's sure is looking mighty pissed in the background there huh

(This was a bad segue. I'm sorry.)

More boards! This time, a joint effort between me and my buddy Tyson. Again, pretty straightforward sequence, just some talking heads with angle changes and BG focus to keep things interesting.

These sketches are Tyson's! Don't you love to see that big "we'll figure it out in post" gun there? And figure it out we did. That's the trouble with giving your character a gun arm, they end up having it forever after and then you may be cursed to draw it at slightly odd angles.

Look at THIS gun arm, though! Now that's scrumptious. Harder to get right than it seems, a dead-on barrel like this, but Tyson is nothing if not god's strongest soldier.

I quite like this pose, partially because it looks like Edolon is almost staring directly at the screen, partially because it works as a nifty little trick in order for us to mess with character screen positioning without it getting confusing! We're about to flip Necron to the right side of the shot, but since we've set Edolon up pointing just past him and over his shoulder, the transition is going to feel natural because our brains will pick up on us switching to more or less the "Edolon camera POV" in the next panel. Watch this:

See? Cool, right. Storyboarding is fun!

And I told you guys we'd be putting Ciro's beautiful background to good use. Here it is! Saved me trouble of having to figure out a new one for this shot. We're back in the Eddie sketches zone, by the way.

Now that the SBB Epilogue is out, this scene between Necron and Oricka turned into a bit of an unintentional parallel there, huh? Granted, these are much less personal and grief-struck circumstances, but it still seems like Necron's learned to not be as hasty with his trigger finger and lust for vengeance. Good on him for listening to Oricka right away this time, they DO need to take care of these traumatized sods. Look at Turnin's face! Can someone give them a baby wipe or something?

Well those aren't ominous parting words at all. Weird!

One nice extra of delving into this post-Incursion segment was that it gave us the opportunity to put a bunch of characters who had previously never exchanged words in the same space. Lots of novel back and forth, like between Turnin and Necron here. On the writing front, it's always interesting to put a new combo of characters together in the same scene to see what happens when they interact, it keeps things fresh!

And we have hit our final stretch of panels, folks. These last ones were boarded and sketched by Ciro again, the absolute legend. It still baffles me how he can knock out such on-model and detailed boards like this and STILL find things to refine in the sketch stage.

AUSTINWYNN: It's very interesting seeing Pozzol and Edolon interact one on one for maybe the second time ever. Like was mentioned before, their personalities clash hard against each other, and their ideals clash even harder. It really shows how loyal Pozzol is to the Mirthamaniacs' cause that he puts up with Edolon.

Yeah, Edolon really doesn't seem to take him very seriously at all. He sure is confident, poking a giant beefy man with scary wrestler powers with such a short stick. But then again, if I could suddenly crumble a whole building on a whim and had massive delusions of grandeur, I'd probably let that get to my head too.

Absolutely gorgeous panels. A gross necrotic body part has NEVER looked this good before, mark my words.

AUSTINWYNN: Because we did post-Incursion after writing the aftermath seen at the start of Act 3 Act 1, this means Pozzol was so attached to his hand trophy that he got a new one in between losing it and Edolon getting to Seinru's body, which is such a funny thing to do even though it's completely accidental on our part.

He NEEDS to keep his style intact. I like to think that he grabbed a second hand out of spite.

AUSTINWYNN: Pozzol makes a really fascinating point. Who's really in control of this operation? Is it truly Weird Al and Hulk Hogan working together? Is it Edolon, playing chess with all the players on the board? Or will it be Pozzol, smart enough to recognize when the game's been rigged?

This was a development we were also looking forward to bringing to light. It's no secret that often the Mirthies and the Harbingers don't see eye to eye, and the friction in their approaches seems to have gotten to be a little too much. Edolon definitely doesn't have the same talent that Seinru did for holding the leash, at least. That's probably a big factor in why things started falling apart now that they're gone.

And that's all for now, folks! Tune in next month as we start to tackle the Occeus and Serpaz updates, which I'm VERY excited to get to. Working on them has been a ton of fun, and there's a lot to talk about there!

I'll be seeing you all later. Stay cool!

- Eddie and AustinWynn