catharsis, page 1

hi everybody. it's time to start catharsis. the comic will be a week ahead of public updates, after polling the preferences people had for the gap between patreon updates and public updates -- it can make a big difference, since a lot of discussion happens after the public pages release.
updates will be midnight on wednesdays and fridays (so like... the late night of tuesdays and thursdays) on patreon; noon for the public. this first page is a little early, but the next update will be midnight on friday, and all following updates will be on that schedule.

there's really only so much i can say on the very first page, because it has nothing to build off of. i watched a lot of videos on film analysis and the basics of film over the last year. it's really intimidating! films can be so carefully crafted, and i'm just one person.
but, what i did learn, and why it's relevant right now, is that the opening shot of a good film is extremely important; what you see is usually like a little microcosm of the themes of the whole story. i tried to be cognizant of that here.
of course, the opening shot itself has a twist, so... it can seem lackluster from just the first panel. to take the edge off, i had the first visuals be a pair of speech bubbles. ideally, it probably should have been the first two bubbles in the first panel be those, but the pacing was very finicky.

the other thing this page sets up is kind of a color language -- i wanted blue and yellow to be prominent colors, with the blue being the shadowy underbelly of the yellow; at the same time, i wanted them to be mixing together to create an unpleasant, greenish setting while remaining discrete.
this dichotomy will branch out into warm colors (red, orange, and yellow) vs. cool colors (primarily, blue and purple). it's a given that not all instances of these colors will be symbolic -- everything has a color, and many of those things are unrelated to the plot. still, i'd like to try to be judicious with scenes where there's a really dominant color.
i'm super rusty at coloring. i haven't been happy with any of the color work thus far... but, the show must go on.