Comic Sketches: January - February 2022

Hello my beautiful Vasted Errors. It is July, which means we are due for another round of comic sketches. Woohoo! And look at that, this one has a fancy new header too. We're living it up over here.

This time we'll be covering the January and February updates, our very first of 2022! Time sure flies. And still it won't be enough to get us out of the Jentha Zone, though it will be enough to push us directly into the Trauma Conga Line of the Jentha Zone. This is where all the terrible action happens.

As I mentioned in last month's commentary, Charlie was our breakout storyboard star for January and he's got a FANTASTIC eye for composition. You can really tell there's a background in animation here, with the way he conveys all the information that needs conveying with such few lines. Mmmm crispy. 

Lots of fun transitions too! Which makes up for the fact that the content of these updates are about to be very not fun.

Aw, look at these commiserating babies. As bold as Jentha's plan is, I don't think anyone on Repiton is physically capable of out-annoying Murrit Turkin. He's had a natural talent for it since Corporate popped the little scamp out of his osmosis tank. 

Ain't he a stinker? I like to imagine kid Murrit sounds Just Like Bart.

Luckily, we've got Albion and Jentha to steer their escapade back on track, because these kids are here to go out and play in the yard and have fun, not witness an endless match of back-and-forth bickering between these two losers. Guess some things never change.

Can you imagine baby Calder assisting in a breakout situation??? Pure comedy material. If you didn't glean it from what Murrit said in this page, he used to be kind of a wimp back then. And now he's a completely different kind of wimp! As in he's an insufferable asshole, like a man undergoing the worst Pokémon evolution ever conceived.

Looooooong panel. I love when we get a chance to do that for visual impact reasons. So many beautiful rocks!

Murrit might've been exaggerating the rehabilitation thing for scary story purposes, but she's not THAT far off from reality, as will be proven in later updates when things go VERY wrong. Uh oh...

Nevermind all that, though. It's play time!!!

How cute. Lots of little details to enjoy about these panels, like Jentha and Dismas having an absolute ball, Murrit trying their best to be the center of attention at all times and Albion peeing her pants at Xtreme Sports - in this case, a merry-go-round spinning a little too fast.

Coming up with alternate, Repiton-ified versions of mundane things (like a playground game, for example) is half the fun of making a comic that features funny little aliens. The one Dismas is talking about here is probably called something like "obey the Executive" in place of "follow the leader".

Yes this planet has a terminal case of late-stage capitalism brainrot thanks for noticing.

And this is where things start to go wrong. LITERALLY pulling his pigtails. Can you get any more obvious, Murrit??? Jeez.

This is a prime example of going a little overboard with your (baby) hate-flirting, which we've seen Murrit do before in the comic, though with several other (adult) complicating factors. Points for the little self-improvement speech at the end, but... 

If things are already messy for us when we're kids navigating all sorts of feelings we have no experience with, imagine what it's like when you've got THREE distinct categories of romance to contend with.

Where exactly is the line of a healthy relationship, when you're expected to twist someone's arm into getting over their issues as a form of love? What does affection look like, when some of it is so tangled up in violence and conflict? It's a hard thing to grapple with, even later in life.

Quadrants, man. Yeesh.

Kirby Is Fucking Pissed!

Historic moment in Vast Error: confronted by the sheer atomic rage of a nuclear-powered three year old, Murrit says he's sorry! 

It will probably never happen again

Throwing this quick color key Xam made for us in here just because I thought it looked nice. Candy colored nuclear powers were an inspired artistic decision, imo.

(Pushing you out of panel bounds) Get OUTTA here!!!!

Bet a lot of you Murrit haters wish you were Jentha right now, huh. Well tough luck, only she has enough guts and moxy to shove this stinky fish off of the monkey bars dome and survive.

Here it comes...

BOOM!!!!

And now I pass the mic over to our one and only Tyson Fireistuck25, animator extraordinaire and legend in general. Take it away!

TYSON: Here's the first pass for the Jentha explode-y panel! You can see that Jentha pushing Murrit was initially part of this gif, but we [ended up splitting that for clarity] in the final shot. It was mostly cut due to time restraints, and while I do like how I sketched her stagger in this, I'd say that the extra panel ended up working WAY better for this scene. The added tension and pacing really puts emphasis on when she finally BOOMS, in my opinion!

Nothing of huge substance to say here, just that I love the way these panels turned out and the color palette we've slipped into for the rest of the scene. Go take a peek if you need a refresher! 

They do a pretty good job of showcasing what Junnos meant when they said they were already afraid of what Jentha could do. Which is blowing up a whole reinforced glass dome by herself, apparently.

Loooooong panel again. This sequence is full of those! I really like the transition from Dismas and Albion crouched on the ground to the layers of Repiton's crust, neat stuff.

Yes these lizards are the exact same panels from the storyboard. No we're not sorry, we let Heather's capable hands take over the animal sketches sometimes.

And that's it for the January updates! Whew. Unfortunately, things are about to go from bad to even MORE bad for these toddlers.

Packed chock full of dynamic action and bold lines, it is none other than Ciro taking the wheels for February! He injected so much life into this super intense sequence, I think his sketches are always lovely to look at. 

And with these updates, we're bringing back the double-panel-per-page shtick we did for a similar sequence of parallel events earlier in the comic, during Dismas and Albion's entry process. The intent here was to build up the tension, as we slowly watch Lizardad tear through everything in his path and inch closer and closer to the kids in the yard.

Look at him, beating the odds and taking all the other Godzillas out. Inspiring.

This is one of my favorite shots in the whole sequence. There's something so melancholic about the framing and Jentha's expression - it's heartbreaking and terrifying in an understated way, but also really gorgeous from a purely visual angle. What a cocktail.

Woooooah what's this it's more Tyson commentary

TYSON: The FX panels are a little more tricky to show WIPs for, since most of them are animated straight-ahead rather than being meticulously sketched out like the character animation is. A lot of them are also done in mostly one sitting (including this one), so if there's a handful of panels missing WIPs, I probably just didn't think to export one while working! I'll be sure to keep better track of that for these Patreon posts now, though.

TYSON: Here's a messy in-process of one of my favorite panels, while I was still trying to figure out how all these moving parts would work and loop together. Pretty sure those wires are the smoothest thing I've animated to date tbh! Glad I can show them off here without the smoke in the way.

So many cute new designs! And we'll never see any of them ever again. Because they're all dead. 

This is just like [S] Incursion :(

Dang that's a nasty ouchie!!!

To all the people wondering why Murrit, Dismas and Albion weren't all instantly cooked by Jentha's radiation powers after being in such close proximity to them, well the answer is very simple. (I teleport behind you and flawlessly execute a throat chop, causing you to black out instantly)

I dunno man. Protagonist immunity??? Don't think about it too hard it's fine. Trolls are tough.

AUSTIN: The real question is: does Dismas have radioactive immunity because he was born with it, from this incident, or due to living with a skulltitan for most of his life? So many choices.

An extremely noble sentiment from Dismas here, even in the face of his new friend combusting into a ball of nuclear fusion right in front of his eyes - though not one filled with a ton of self-preservation. Which, y'know, tracks.

Oh no this is so sad. Poor Jentha, look at-

SKULLTITAN BUSTIN' THROUGH

This is where we decided to slip the knife in betwixt the ribs and directly into the hearts of many. The initial plan actually wasn't to have Jentha echo the "just leave/can't leave" moments with Arcjec and Taz, but the idea came about while we were working on the final editing pass of the update's script. We do love a good opportunity to make things hurt, plus it felt fitting, considering the deeply traumatic circumstances of the whole event.

Will any other characters be joining the ranks in the future? Who knows. Only time will tell. Also we don't want to overuse this device TOO much, lest it start feeling a bit cheap.

Violence! Carnage! Oh my! I sure hope at least some of those deceased teachers managed to sneak in a donation to the reduplication banks before all this. Repiton needs those genetic lineages, they don't grow on trees!

Uh Oh.

Children spotted. And, most importantly: the source of all that yummy radiation.

Can someone PLEASE give this child a handkerchief???

Now there's a skulltitan LOOSE in the schoolyard. So much for the Corporate space with the alleged highest security measures. Don't seem to be working out too hot for anyone right now.

And that's a wrap for July's comic commentary! Hope you guys enjoyed watching these toddlers have a lot of fun and then start to have the opposite of fun. Next month we'll be delving into the March and April updates, which will be nearly all that's left of the Jentha flashback sequence. 

See you cool cats then!

- Eddie