This page is weak regarding the art. I should’ve filled in all that white space. Looks a bit weird, all these panels floating in blankness. All the poses and whatnot are off, which is a jarring juxtaposition with the sequence on the last page. It works to forward the subplot story, though, so I’ll likely hold off on editing it until I do some upgrades for the collected version.
Pre-Busboy Blues Timeline
Should straighten out some plot points:
Spring, 2516: VonDye, previously chief pilot on The Phoenix, is living a life of drunken, thieving vagrancy. Having been drinking buddies with Johnny Farnam, an ex-Browncoat and bounty hunter, since his Phoenix days, they run into each other on Persephone, and Johnny introduces his fiance, Naiya Beddau. The three become a close-knit family, and Von eventually helps them find work aboard the St. Michael. They ask Von to come along, but previous confrontations between him and the ships’ law-abiding captain make it impossible. However, a short time after, the captain of the Michael’s life is devastated by a family emergency, leaving the crew without jobs or a home. Naiya’s father, Thomas Beddau, steps in, providing her with a strings‑attached refurbished Firefly, the Chong Sheng. Naiya immediately contacts her friend Vondye and brings him on board as third-in-command, along with an assorted ragtag group of social misfits. It’s not long before being treated for bullet holes and other fun wounds by the ship’s doc becomes the norm for the crew.
Winter, 2517 (roughly February): Escapades for the month involve a deadly and tragic confrontation with Reavers out near Lilac regarding a distress call from the crew of the Invictus. The Sheng emerges from the brutal battle unscathed, at least physically, though others involved are not so lucky. Some weeks later, Naiya and Johnny leave the ship in the hands of Vondye, putting him in charge of the crew’s well-being, and go to deal with the Royal Eagles, slave-traders currently terrorizing close friends of the Beddau’s. They are not heard from for several weeks. Thomas Beddau continues to fund the Chong Sheng for a time, but eventually recalls the ship and has it mothballed. When news finally comes, it is that Johnny Farnam is dead, and Naiya has been severely injured. Naiya undergoes multiple reconstructive surgeries, temporarily retiring to Temple Pa Kau, where she makes no contact with the outside world.
Meanwhile, with no word from the crew of the Sheng, who by now are scattered with some likely dead, VonDye returns home to Paquin and rekindles his criminal relationship with his brother, Deeke’s, organization. Already wallowing in the bottle, it’s not long before Von’s cut of the pay and his thuggish lifestyle opens the gate to much more efficient means of keeping his mind numb. Years pass in which continuous moral plight and subjugation take their toll. Von, strung out and close to the point of total physical and psychological meltdown, finally makes an attempt on Deeke’s life. But his deteriorating state is evident when the job is botched and Deeke is left wounded but breathing. Von manages to flee with a small fortune in stolen credits.
Taking a break while I deal with some family events, job interviews, time-consuming pet projects, and wait for my Wacom to arrive.
Either I’m getting faster or this page wasn’t that demanding, because I’m usually dragging the final touches out to at least Sunday. Granted, I could probably spend some more time on this if I really wanted to, but I feel at this point I’d just fuck it up. And I really like the uniformity I’ve got going in those bottom panels, so I’d rather not fuck it up.
This is an important page in the spectrum of the comics’ entirety in terms of elaborating on plot points. I never felt the addiction subplot was fleshed out in the first chapter, and it’s such an important aspect of the story and part of Zach that I didn’t want to gloss it over.
Zach’s arm pose in the bottom panel is a bit obtrusive, but I liked the the vein stylization so much that I didn’t want to remove it. Without it, the impact of the panel wasn’t as dramatic, either. Art doesn’t always imitate life, I guess.
The tumblr re-size might be assy for this page, so here’s a bigger version
Cue: The Birthday Party- Sometimes Pleasure Heads Must Burn
In comic format, I have this set up as a 2 page spread because I think it works best that way. Took a good chunk of time to finish just this one page. I got obsessed with tweaking the shadows, and kept making slight changes until I felt I got the right feel and look. Er, no pun intended.
When I first sketched up this page, I wasn’t sure it was going to actually make it into the plot. It didn’t seem to add much at first, and was just something fun and challenging to draw. Also, I had a wrestling match with the appropriateness of the tone and theme again. My style of cartoony comic-making and heavily stream of consciousness writing doesn’t always seem appropriate to handle this kind of subject matter, especially with the introduction of another (darker) layer of Zach’s personality. It seems to almost clash. I’m not sure if it comes off forced or works to give the pacing depth because of that.
This page got away from me, and took a massive leap towards more work than I planned. I’m not sure it paid off. It feels like it could use more lighting work, and the tiny middle left panel bugs me since the day I drew it for being so damn small and obscure.
The plot gets heavier from here on in straight to the end of the chapter, and keeps rolling straight through the beginning of the 4th. In many ways for me, the first two chapters were warm-ups, and this first stretch of heavier plots are the marathon. I have no idea how I’m going to follow through with the work I’ve planned. It’ll be technically and dynamically demanding for the skill level I’m at. I cringe at the impending train wreck, but I also anticipate the challenge.
Now that I’ve also caught up with my page count, I’m only going to be posting once a week. The coloring process takes too much time for me to bang out more than 1 color page in that time span.
Went more hardcore in trying to incorporate ambient lighting. It’s a time consuming process, and I think I screwed up in the 2nd panel and the 3rd to a lesser extent. Last panel was easiest, and also my favorite of the bunch. There was some inner dialogue there, but I felt it was redundant within the sequence that the next two pages make.
The general consensus is that the rain in the first panel is, well, a bit suggestive. I tried to make it reflect the colors around it so it was more realistically watery, but I ain’t that good yet. So it’ll remain looking gooey and inappropriate (also the fault of my organic style). I do like the mood the soft glow in that panel creates, though. It’s exactly the right feel I was aiming for.
Using Rassafraggin’s very helpful ambient lighting advice, I think I picked up some small idea of showing light sources with colorization. Though it’s definitely far from perfected here, I think the coloring hints at a dark, rainy night with an artificial light source- a streetlamp or the glow from the Smirking Dragon. Or at least it’s a start to depicting such lighting schemes. Over the next few pages I’ll be using it a lot, so it’ll give me the opportunity to practice.
Not too fond of that second panel. Could’ve been more action oriented or emotionally drawn to match the creepy tone of the page. I also wish the demon in the first panel wasn’t so cartoony, because she’s much scarier in the 4th panel (and in the 2nd chapter, when she originally appeared). The cartooniness detracts from the rest of her depictions.
This page has the only reference to an actual time frame and date in the comic, which I think was a huge mistake on my part- not having fleshed out the when and where of the universe. What made it even more of a problem was the lack of any real futuristic technology until the second chapter, and only the occasional mention of planets and spaceships in the first.
The fact that the third chapter takes on a sudden heavy sci-fi slant feels jarring from my perspective because of that when it shouldn’t be. Yet another valuable learning experience.
In truth, though, I think I was avoiding these elements because I wasn’t confident that I could handle drawing them yet.
The bottom panel was extremely frustrating, even with perspective reference. The angle of Zull’s body in the seat and the position of the seat in regard to cabin size and Von’s position is all screwy, and the panel needs to be bigger and rectangular to fit the sequence. To go back and fix it now would destroy the original sheet. I’d have to re-draw the entire thing.
In hindsight I probably should’ve walked away from the drawing board that day and came back a bit later, because I could’ve worked it out much more accurately. I think this was a page I had drawn at 6am, so next time I best take my own advice.
There was some wrestling with the subject matter as well. The plot of BB is fairly frivolous, with some grittier elements thrown in here and there for robustness. I didn’t want to make light of the subject (barring some parody pages I did with this sequence out of an aggravating art block & much indecision), but I also needed Von’s situation to be harrowing, and for Zull to have a broad malicious streak. There’s a chunk of plot development that banks on those elements.