ALL EYES ON ME (pages 3 and 4)

Now… WHEW! You know those three people from the previous page? Well DAMN, they all just got their eyeballs ripped out! Must suck!!! 😭😭😭

The layout for page 3 was one of the last ones I figured out before I started to draw the comic. I knew what came before and what came after, but I felt like the page needed to convey a fair amount of stuff AND fit in with the wild aesthetic I was cultivating. I had a bunch of different ideas, including, like, her arm reaching out from the top left corner of the page and the interior space of the arm was showing the action happening - I don’t know lmao. Like, there is the comic Mirror by Emma Rios and Hwei Lim, and the way that comic utilizes structures to affectively induce paneling is crazy and really inspiring.

Unfortunately I didn’t do that hahaha — but I think what I did do is really cool nonetheless! Without intent, I ended up making the page look like a bomb was dropping onto these people’s lives. I loved that the page surrounds this eyeball, and the way the narration flows down into it, revealing that all of these people have been cut free, but that they are now in agony. In some ways I wish I had differentiated the hands a little bit in those three panels, but it is what it is; I think the point gets across!

The top three panels… I really wanted Callisto to feel like someone who gets sick pleasure out of her task; she truly believes in her mission, and she revels in it, dominating each individual whose eyes she removes. Her looking like a dominatrix was not an accident, let me tell you!

The bottom of page 3 — I contemplated not including all those A’s, because I thought it might read as silly. Like I wanted it to feel like a continuous screaming was emanating from that alley. I also wanted them to feel cold and away from the surrounding world, and so I set them in an area in which you can only feel the coldness of space up above; they are alone with their pain. RIP 😔🙏🙏🙏

Page 4 was actually like maybe the first or second page I drew, and it was one I had to go back and fix a few times. I immediately knew what I wanted from it; in the Toppi book, there is a page which has a character standing in a doorway with a light fixture hanging down in negative space EXACTLY like what I drew here. I literally just kinda ripped it off, but I’d rather think of it as loving homage to the thing which inspired this entire comic hahaha. I also wanted to reveal in my own way this kind of dilapidated factory/structure in which she is hiding with her lover, keeping it in silhouette but with enough detail to really get a sense of both its shape and ruin. I liked her energy walking in, and the big close-up on her face was super important to me.

The hard part of the page - and the reason for which I had to keep returning - was the three faces up at the top. I don’t exactly know what it looks like when you have your eyeballs ripped out, and frankly I don’t want to know lol (I am squeamish); all I could think of was the scene early in Minority Report where Tom Cruise goes to buy some drugs and the guy reveals her has no eyes and it’s like, “Oh shit!” So I kind of tried to base them off that, but the combination of faces in extreme misery, at weird angles, completely dirty, and eyeless, was a lot for me! It was another one of those rendering challenges like I talked about on page 2; I don’t love it when you can tell an artist doesn’t know what they’re doing because it’s clear they put lines on the page to just make something look detailed; I never want to be that, and I worried about that here. If I were a more confident artist, maybe I’d have just left the faces without shading at all - really lean into a form of dissociative horror. But NOPE! I just tried to find something that looked correct enough for me, and I kept working on it intermittently while drawing the rest of the comic to get there.

I think Callisto’s lines of dialogue on this page are maybe the first I figured out in the whole comic, like a romantic wife coming home to surprise the love of her life with a gift she picked up for them that day. I kind of like how horrifying that implication is, with respect to the entire world we see around the characters. This place is broken - everything feels like hell.

I can’t remember if I had mentioned this earlier, but one of the big influences on certain aspects of this comic was Dorohedoro (mind you, I have never read the manga and have only seen two episodes of the anime, but it still affected me); like this world in which maybe it’s NOT that crazy to see a woman out and about dressed like that. Vile things happen, and the world is crazy and kind of sucks, but that’s just the way the game is played. Callisto probably dresses a bit wilder than most other people, but I am sure she is not the ONLY one.

So that was pages 3 and 4! What do you all think? Anything you find of particular interest? Would love to hear any thoughts y’all have! ☺️☺️☺️🙏