[090816]
The archive links for part 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 don’t work right now… that’s intentional (or rather, it’s not that I don’t know it doesn’t work). The archives have been revised (final revision at that) and I haven’t bothered to upload the new revisions and change the links yet. Sooner or later, though.
While the Directorate arc has been complete for about a month now, it’s taken me that same time to finally get out a final revision. I’d estimate that I re-wrote about twenty to twenty five percent of the text on my first revision pass, which took almost two days. Second and third passes were largely there to weed out typos, and then I had J and another friend of mine go over it for typos as well. I’m actually surprised J caught so many on the final pass, even after I had already gone over it three or four times by then. I suppose I’m not going to make a very good editor…
At any rate, I’m going to make a print copy of the whole thing (yes, all 165 pages) sometime this week, just for reference. The whole lot comes out to be a 44MB PDF, which isn’t that bad in the end. No Starcrossed scale printing disasters.
But back to the present, number 514, that is. This is the 26th page from the end of the arc. But let’s go back two pages, to 512, for a minute. I actually thought the deal with 512 and 513 was gonna be a big one, but it turned out to be something I totally forgot about when it actually happened. Y’see, this is the image that’s in the site banner right now. It was drawn in July of 2006, at about the time 405 was drawn.
That was a long time ago. So long ago, I had just started using the comic number in the dropdownlist, and had not started using the archive pngs as the comics themselves. At some point around this time, shortly after the creation of said illustration, I decided that that was where I wanted the story to go (towards the illustration, that is), and the result is that this picture has more or less driven the story these past three years. If you fit it in between 512 and 513, it almost works perfectly. That was planned since three years ago. It took me three years to get there.
Much of this story has been planned the same way. Way early on I decided on a couple scenes that I wanted to reach and simply ended up trying to link them together. Most notable is the sequence between 473 and 475, which, from the very start was supposed to be the turning point of the story. Everytime I hit one of these points, in drawing and in posting, I keep thinking, “wow, we’re already there”. Even the coming up sequence is basically something I knew I’d have to draw from day 1 (whenever that was).
But enough of this story arc, we’re moving onto the next one in the drawing department.
Yes, that’s right, the next story arc. The Directorate story arc is just an arc; in the grand scheme of things, it’s the length of one volume of typical manga (aka not really all that much). Transportation and stuff was my focus for a long time, so all of my past works have featured spaceships and stuff quite prominently, but what I really want to draw is a – forgive the terminology, I really don’t have a better word – shoujo story arc.
Not only that, I’m trying, yet again, to move to an all-tablet drawing work flow. So far, this has failed like three or four times by now. There’ve been false starts at 454, 468, and 479, but this time might be it. I’m on my third all-tablet page and they aren’t really looking that bad albeit taking forever to do.
Ok, the whole tablet thing saved a different entry. That’s all for now.
