I’m working on the bonus story, “Refulgence of Refuge,” and the final panel has to do quite a bit of heavy lifting. If you’re familiar with book 19 then you know (spoiler alert) that a civilization of feathered raptor-oids among Earth’s dinosaurs was rescued by an advanced civilization. “Refulgence of Refuge” gives us the details of this rescue, and because of the title, which literally means “shininess of the safe place,” I need to make the some panels, especially the last one, live up to the word “refulgent.”
Back when the only version of THE LION KING was the original animated feature Sandra and I came up with a term to describe certain kinds of triumphant endings: “we all have rawwrs together.” And of course the JURASSIC PARK franchise features several iconic closing scenes in which a dinosaur (the t. rex, usually) goes “rawwr” with a cool backdrop.
So, the closing panel needed some shiny and some roaring. I’m not revealing the entire thing here, but I’m happy to share the “rawwr” part of the panel.
How close am I to being finished? In lieu of a progress bar, here’s a spreadsheet full of tick-boxes.
My goal is to finish everything during the first week of March, and then race through the various editorial, commentary, and marginalia tasks for Book 19 in time to send it to the printer at the end of March.
It’s for just one panel in the Book 19 bonus story, but it’s an important panel, and it needs to look good. In the amount of time I spent noodling on this? 2018’s version of me could have written and illustrated two weeks of comics.
I do, however, take comfort knowing that 2018’s version of me, while quite good at his job, could not have done this panel without focused practice and enough time to become 2019’s version of me.
Much of the time I spent working on this piece went into research. I had questions: What was the angle of the impactor? How large was it? What are the physics of the impact? I looked at lots of art from science communications (sci-comm) folks, and tried to reconcile their many different approaches with the theories about the event, and (of course) with the picture *I* wanted to draw.
Yes, it was time-consuming, but I learned some new things, and I learned how to DO some new things, and right now I’m pretty pleased with the results.
Long COVID has made the last couple of months quite difficult for me. I supposed it’s inaccurate to say that slowing down has been hard for me to do, because I haven’t been given a choice in the matter. What’s been difficult is adapting, adjusting, and ultimately accepting the slow-down.
For those just catching up on the old news, I contracted COVID back in “wave zero,” the community-spread wave in late January of 2020 when none of us thought the virus was here yet. I was the father of the bride at a wedding whose guests included a family who had guests in their home who had recently arrived from Wuhan province in China. I got better, but I never got all the way better, and I’ve been dealing with chronic fatigue ever since.
The salient point: I want to do more than I am doing. I mean, sure, I want to do more than I am *able* to do, which is a pretty common desire among humans of all stripes, but especially among those whose abilities have been, for whatever reason, reduced in scope.
So what *am* I doing? Well, today I’m writing this, and then diving back into the marginalia for Book 18, which we can’t send to the printer until it has all its marginalia. A lot of the pieces are things like this one – concept sketches which I’ve revisited digitally and cleaned up so they look nicer.
Concept sketch of Peri Gugro, a Fobott’r female soldier and (eventual) clan mother
The marginalia is a necessity born of the fact that Schlock Mercenary was not originally formatted for print. Comics should be written and illustrated to the page turn, with attention given to the reveal that occurs as the reader turns the page and uncovers the art and dialog of the next spread. I say “should” be because Schlock Mercenary definitely is NOT written that way.
When we put it into print, we can fit four regular-sized strips on a single page of the book. A week of strips has nine of these rectangular collections of panels, because Sundays have three, and those last three strips in the week need to all be on the same page. Since no amount of fudging the math will make 9 cleanly divisible by 4, a week of Schlock Mercenary takes up three pages of book, and those three pages have some white space.
Hence the marginalia. Sometimes a weekday installment is extra large, sometimes there’s a footnote, and sometimes I broke the pattern in other ways, and so sure, sometimes the white space has taken care of itself, but sometimes my layout shenanigans mean an entire half-page of the book needs a new picture.
So that’s what I’m working on. I wish I could do more, or do it faster, and maybe the booster shot I got two days ago will perk me up the way previous booster shots have, but I’m not going to wait for a cure before I get back to work. I’m just going to accept that I have to slow down.
As part of this project I’m designing two posters, both of which will have all seventy maxims on them. Yesterday I spent a few hours tweaking various text attributes like kerning and quote height, and finished up the two-column version of the poster. It’ll be a 16″x20″ thing, and will look something like this…
If you want to get your hands on one of these posters, perhaps for the wall of your office, or maybe the local kindergarten, jump in on the Backerkit project today. We’ll be printing extras, of course, but backing the project is the only way to ensure that we set one aside for you.
And speaking of Backerkit… this project is an experiment, a stress-test of a new soup-to-nuts crowdfunding service, an alternative to Kickstarter. For several projects we’ve used Backerkit in conjunction with Kickstarter, because Backerkit makes fulfilment easier for complex projects. They’ve been around for a while, and we love working with them.
We still like working with Kickstarter, but it’s good to have an alternative—especially since Kickstarter briefly flirted with adding NFTs to their blockchain infrastructure, sending much of their community scrambling for other options. They’ve backed away from that ledge, at least for now, which makes us happy. Also, we are happy to be trying out a different service. We like having options.
Unsurprisingly, there are a couple of maxims that may apply here:
50: If it only works in exactly the way the manufacturer intended, it is defective. 30: A little trust goes a long way. The less you use, the further you’ll go.
(You, too, can cite maxims as if from memory… all you need is one of these fancy new posters on a wall where you can see it.)
