“Striking Sparks” — Page Sixty-Four

Mar01
by Bob Forward on 2015-03-01 at 21:00
Chapter:

It’s a supernatural showdown between the determined detective with the Spirit Guardian and our hapless hero’s Defending Angel!

This is one of those “frozen moment” scenes like in the Matrix or the show Constantine (when the angel Manny shows up.) Time has stopped for everyone else, but Letoa, Manaia, Sophie, and Max are all still functioning — though Max is too damaged to move much.

Since this is a comic and we don’t have the benefit of movement (or lack thereof) to create the effect, we’ve utilized lighting and color to try to accomplish a similar feel. Everything in Panel 3 is being experienced by our main characters, but the Chief and all other emergency personnel are excluded and unaware.

For this particular page, Max-The-Artist decided to portray the ever-shifting Manaia as a sort of tentacled nautilus; possibly going into defensive mode. As for Sophie, she’s definitely coming into her own; it would appear she’s starting to get a handle on this whole “being dead” thing, and woe betide any woman who threatens her man!

BTW, Sophie’s “wings” are actually flamethrower bursts; I had fun going through the footage frame-by-frame looking for particularly winglike billows, which Max-The-Artist then color-changed to a more spiritual blue and tweaked a bit to enhance the winglike aspect.

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More below!

 

Bobservations:

This was a hard page to crop. We always make them oversized so that we’ll have “bleed room” for eventual book form, but occasionally Max and I forget that we do that and end up filling the page with art and/or effects. In this case, every attempt to crop it 6 x 9 as we normally do chopped Letoa off at the ankles, which is a compositional no-no. Sizing it down caused the pentacle to bump the border and made the text too small to read easily, especially on a smartphone. I eventually sized it up slightly — which is to say, I didn’t shrink it down as much as we normally do; the actual cropped art is 3000 x 4500 so there’s plenty of leeway. In any case, this allowed me to crop Letoa at a more compositionally pleasing mid-calf. But for those who might like to see the full page as Max turned it in, you can find that here.

 

Yet Another Shameless Plug

You may be aware that for the past couple of years I’ve been a co-writer (with my sister Eve) on a webnovel called GyreWorld. It’s a darkly humorous fantasy novel, somewhat similar to Pratchett’s Small Gods in tone, only gorier and with more explosions. (What a surprise!) Anyway, it had been intended from the get-go to have a beginning, middle, and end; and now that end has been reached. So the whole thing — all 800 pages of it — is now available on Amazon as an e-book. If you’re into fantasy adventure novels or you know someone who is, give it a try or send them the link!

GyreCover_400

A novel about Life, Love, Magic, and the True Meaning of Death.

— Bob out