unsounded

13_52

Sometimes I think the more we've seen, the less we see.

13_51

This page may possibly contain a Lilo and Stitch reference.

13_50

Matty's usually pretty chipper and ready to chat, but he's not really keen on talking to a stranger about his mom's murder. Jivi senses that right off and lets him off the hook, which was pretty intuitive of him. Eat your stew, baby.

13_49

I dunno, I think fish stew sounds pretty scrumptious. Be more grateful, twerps.

This page took a while to do - lots of detail - but I really wanted to set the rest of this scene up well and make the place feel lived in. We'll come back to this room a few times after this scene, it's mildly important!

13_48

This page features at least four separate flavours of creepy - something for everyone!

13_47

Dinner procession? Whose dinner? Who's dinner?! Duane, leave 'em alone!

There are so many characters in this scene, it was fun and also difficult to make everyone distinct :D I challenged my Same-Facey bad habit.

13_46

Why is there a dead waterbaby in a tank in the shrine mistress' office? Interesting choice of decor. All it does is remind Duane very violently that Cresce is a nightmare, and it should be exposed to the light. Savagely.

13_45

Mistress Lori - Iori Ripa's sister - is in charge of the whole of Litriya Shrine, and this little cubbyhole in her office has a few details that say a lot about her for anyone who cares to look.

I think Duane exercises a fair bit of restraint in not knocking the head off the startlingly chatty Yerta altar.

13_44

Sette with her nose pressed against the door is my favourite thing.

13_43

Wanted a bit of moody atmosphere to help segue to a more serious tone. Litriya Shrine is normally a bustling little place full of local farmers and river fishers praying to the idols, seeking blessings, and bringing the kept twins food and gifts. The storm has the shrine sharply cut off from all of that though, leaving things rather eerie.

Anyway, it's almost never a good sign when Duane starts seeing Mikaila out of the corner of his eye.

13_42

Ruffles is easily excitable. Hasn't been a whole lot going on stuck in this island shrine!

13_40&41

Two pages! The urge to draw Duane just scooping Ruffles up like a baby-doll was almost irresistible; I compromised with stick-fighting. But lemme say that getting the both of them in one frame is an exercise in angles.

13_39

Duane is not very stealthy.

13_38

Sette's little vision of Starfish is pretty gross if you look too closely. I'm not sure what wigged her out more about that entire night: Starfish almost getting the best of her or all the pain babies talking about making the world pay for forgetting them. They need to just stay crammed down in her subconscious, thankyouverymuch. Candy will help.

13_37

Sette thought the baubles in the wall were of value but alas - only glass. Ruffles is a good catch though.

13_36

Sette hasn't gotten to cut loose and feed her inner greed in a while. Steal it all, girl. That better not be wine in that bottle though.

(it is)

Roger's hand

This was a gif I made to test how the disintegration frames animated while I was working on them. I'm really fond of this little javascript trick - it's very simple but the fact that the reader advances it themselves, just like you advance the pages of the comic, makes it integrate way better into the comic experience than a regular animated gif would. You'll be seeing it used again later on for sure.

13_34&35

Please pop over to the site for this update - the javascript isn't something I can really replicate here.

I wanted to show Roger quite literally falling apart thanks to the snakejerk's ministrations. This was his end, and we won't ever see him lucid again in the present day.

So the whole marriage was a sham, it seems. I don't think this is a terrible shocker, they don't seem to really m...

13_33

Ahh, so perhaps Roger is not an ignorant victim of this but a willing - if miserable - volunteer. And perhaps Queen Sonorie is not the conscienceless wretch Alderode (and Duane) have painted her as. Had you taken everyone's word for it?

Her Majesty gives me anxiety on this page though. Goes from snake monster in her face to her blatantly displeased Chancellor to her friend? Lord Foi-Hellick face-planting on her carpet. Nothing is easy. Everything is terrible.

13_32

I would suggest, your Majesty, that it might be a good idea to send the Black Tongues a strongly worded postcard asking that they never let Ruckmearkha get his weird three-fingered hands on dat knife. In fact maybe they should stop tinkering with this knife thing altogether and just worry about Roger and figuring out how to frig up Alderode.

Really that's the rubbiest of the rubs here - it's not just dangerous to be asking favours of something like Ruckmearkha, but also of the Black Tongues. Y...

13_31

TFW you think you've met a rare, rational spiderpaw and she still refuses to see how much happier she'd be if she didn't have a head full of regrets.

13_30

I think Ruckmearkha looks best in really warm light like this; I intentionally lit both the last scene with him in the office and this scene in  fiercely orange light. Put him in natural lighting or under a blue sky and he looks garish.

Anyway, pat the queen.

13_29

I like that shot of Ruckmearkha. He looks spooky.

13_28

Couldn't get the idea of a history book with teeth out of my head. Imagine reading the whole history of your family in one; so many people fighting the same battles for so long, and to what end? I know it would drive me to start thinking outside the book, I mean, box.

13_27

I'm sure Duane will be on his best behaviour inside the shrine. In spite of his protests I don't think he has much choice but to help Minnow and the water tarts out though, not if he wants to head after the Silver. He can walk on the bottom of the river but Sette can't. He's not going to leave her behind, therefore something has to be done about this deadly weather, mm? Also, unfortunately, it's just The Right Thing To Do.

I'm sure finding a few stranded waterladies won't be any big deal thoug...

13_26

Glimpse the tiny Knock-Me-Down? I'm sure everyone inside is just fine and they are playing raucous road games as they travel. I spy something red~

13_25

Poor ugly Duane. I think his philosophy on the matter is a.... reasonably healthy one though?

13_24

Minnow's dialogue was an interesting challenge. She speaks perfectly fluent Continental - standard west Crescian accent - but she hasn't had a conversation with a human in probably forty years so she needed to sound a bit stilted. Not ancient and wise; not terribly idiosyncratic or accented; but stilted.

The little touches were fun, like "gone" instead of "dead" in reference to the dead soldiers and "long thoughts" to describe souls.

Duane's hand is still wrong and it wounds me.

13_23

I had a hard time finding a good, boobless crop of this page to use as a preview image for Twitter :3

Trivia: Duane's not pulling his hood closer because he's afraid she'll see what he is (she's already holding his leg) but because he finds her terribly beautiful and she makes him feel terribly, terribly ugly. Sometimes beautiful people are worse than mirrors to the incurably hideous.

13_22

You know, you wouldn't think it would be very hard to draw someone with the wrong hand on their arm, but it's actually really, really hard! It goes against all your instincts! I don't know how other artists handle anatomy but at this point in my life I'm mostly on autopilot when I do it. I have mental 3D models in my head that pose for me when I draw, and the required information goes right to my stylus with minimal thinking. But those models don't include switched hands! So Duane was v...