Episode 1 Part 4

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Episode 1 Part 3

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Merry Christmas from Republic of Thorns!

 

Wishing you and yours the very best this Christmas season!

It does my heart good to see Commodore Terrance happy, rather than, say, desiring to send someone on a one-way trip to the vacuum of space sans spacesuit. See, I said she had a sweet side. ;)

Merry Christmas!

P.S. I keep misspelling Gannet's name! It's Gannet, not Garret. I wish now I had named him Garret.

Character Cameo: Commodore Terrance

Commodore Terrance taunting her enemies

 

Ever fall in love with a character unexpectedly? One you thought would be unimportant, even one you thought you might kill off? Commodore Amanda Terrance is that character for me.

Terrance was originally going to be a man, and was originally going to die fairly early on. I decided there weren't enough strong women in the comic yet, so I invented Commodore Terrance. A strong woman - she is that. She is one of those six-foot-tall Nordic women who somehow manage to be both beautiful and to look like they could snap your neck with their pro wrestler muscles.

She wouldn't hesitate to. She has some sadistic tendencies, and enjoys the prospect of destroying the rebel fleet just a bit more than professionalism requires. I like to say that there are no good guys in the comic but they all have reasons for doing things that seem right to them, and that nothing is black and white in it, but she definitely has a touch of the villain to her. At the same time, she is exceedingly honorable and loyal, especially to her superior Admiral Linden who is temperamentally her opposite.

She is not a monster, she is very loyal to the Union of Planets and has very little patience with those who are not. And... yeah she loves to kill and dominate in what she considers to be a good cause. Arguably she is less of a monster than another character that has yet to be introduced but who will become very important, Admiral Hiro of the Space Navy of the Republic. Terrance follows rules and respects the authority over her, so while she may become very cruel and vindictive, she won't (readily) commit crimes against humanity as an officer with as much power as she has might be able to.

If she has one shortcoming as an officer, it is that she is so convinced of both the rightness of her cause and the almighty power of the Union Navy that she considers her enemies just foolish insects to be crushed underfoot, incapable of significantly disrupting her prospects for total victory. However her killing instincts and overwhelming numerical superiority usually make up for her lack of foresight and contingency planning.

Her disrespectful attitude towards Commodore Burnson is mostly down to his lack of military decorum. He is Admiral Linden's "staff geek," a brilliant strategist and intelligence officer, but often partially out of uniform and perhaps a tad disheveled. He is Linden's "brains" as versus Terrance's "brawn" and the two don't get along very well.

I harbor the impression that Terrance actually does have a sweet side. Assuming she dates, I can imagine her making sweet yet awkward gestures like baking brownies and touching up stains on a beau's lapel.

It is a side of her, that her unfortunate enemies will never ever see.

 

 

Episode 1 Part 2

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I made a little bit of a liar of myself: in my last post about 3D modeling I said that the artwork won't be 3D modeled, but 3D models will be used as the guide for the hand artwork. Well, while the fully warped-in "UEPSS Victoria" is hand drawn, the image of it coming out of warp was based on the 3D model which I outlined in Photoshop with the help of a neon glow filter. So no part of that image is actually drawn.

In case you are wondering if all the geegaws and doohickeys on that spaceship (and the spaceships I do generally) have actual functions, yes they do. While the whole wormhole thing is fantasy tech, otherwise I like to have reasons for everything. The Victoria has an actual and semi-thought-out propulsion system that smart and somewhat sane people have meditated seriously upon, and the 11410 Scout-Destroyer has a different propulsion system that this smart and somewhat sane person has thought about as to whether maybe it would actually work given a few hundred billion in R&D dollars.

So aside from the wormholes, and maybe the fusion drive of the "Golden" space hauler, I like to base things on tech that might actually work. Not that any of that will ever be mentioned very much. Since I don't know how one would actually make a fusion rocket engine, I will wave my magic wand and make it so, but only on slow and unimportant craft. For the big and fast ships, I am using the only known technology that could propel a ship at a tenth of the speed of light, which is some variant of nuclear detonation engine.

 

Behind the Scenes: Why 3D Model?

 It is not immediately apparent perhaps why I would 3D model spaceships for instance when I am going to draw them anyway. I am not using the 3D models as artwork, but as guides for the artwork. I want to get the ships and other structures right every time from every angle. Then once I model them and print out how they look from the desired angle, I draw them in the comic based on that.

This is an image of the 3D model of the orbital cannon in TinkerCad:

I use TinkerCad because it is very easy and quick to use, and also it is free. And here is what I drew and how I manipulated it in Photoshop:

The lines you see in the final image are usually not actually what I drew because inked lines with pens (I use Micron pens) are not black enough and don't scan black enough. So I actually select the (semi-) black color in the image, create a new layer, and pour pure black in the spaces that the semiblack occupied.

You are also not seeing it at the scale I created it at. The images on the web are 1000 x 771 pixels usually. The original artwork was done on 8.5 x 11 inches card stock, and scanned at 300 dpi. I prefer bristol board, but I have a ton of card stock that I am not otherwise using, and it is basically as good.

I always work larger than the final size because otherwise doing the small bits gets too fiddly. I am not the only one who does this, comic artists in general do it. Marvel comics for instance are originally done half-up, which is to say that the original artwork is 50% larger than the printed artwork. Or at least that is how it was done back in the day when the art was all done by hand.

Getting back to the 3D modeling, in short I 3D model to make sure I get the perspective and all the little details right every time I draw a given spaceship or structure. I also add shading or other effects in Photoshop to the scanned artwork and darken the lines. So the comic is done by hand, but it is also done by computer in many respects.

I am in the middle of modeling a whole fleet and once I am done with that I can start cranking out the next pages in Episode 1.

Addendum:
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Well now I have actually used 3D modeled artwork directly in the comic, in a page I have not released yet. I had the choice between using a very cool looking image from a 3D model or trying to do it from hand, and I used the 3D model. I tried to keep the B&W sketch-like look as much as possible though.

Episode 1 Part 1

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I apologize for the massive text dumps in these initial pages, it couldn't be helped. This is a comic of ideas as well as of explosions and epic space battles (there is some of that coming up soon!)

Arguably this is not a space opera (I just like the phrase.) You could consider it military science fiction, but I don't consider it that at all. Sure there are a lot of big military spaceships and space battles. What it really is, is a meditation on freedom and submission set to the background of things going kablammo in space.

While this is an accurate description, it still sounds wrong. Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose, and submission is something almost everyone does every day. I am not taking a side in this comic, I am merely riffing on the tonalities of autonomy and submission, as well as some interesting/horrible aspects of war. What you THINK about all of this, is up to you. They are all my children, and I love them all.

NOTE December 8 2021
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I lost my internet for a few days and that put me back but I hope to be getting out the next installation in a week or two. I can't 3D model very well without the internet, I use TinkerCad to model all the spaceships and I am going to need a ton of new models for an upcoming scene.