Retrospect on issue #04

There's just something that's gotta be said about books that are done months ahead of their release. I mean this issue isn't gonna be out until the end of APRIL.

Now hey what am I talkin' about? That's what this blog is for!
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Issue 4 picks off right after the last panel in the midst of the chaos that was issue 3. This time around it focuses a little more on the characters, so that pretty much means no dinosaur stampede orgy [WHOO HOO]; though of course that doesn't mean no obligatory fight scenes with the big guys and tons of debris flying everywhere. To my count there's at least 3-4 of them.

There's still a bit of blood to go around, me I'm wishing I got to paint more of that and maybe some viscera like in issue #1. Ah well. Word of advice, don't ever piss Lilli off. She'll spray your pants with flesh-eating acid and you'll find yourself living a scene outta Planet Terror. I know she don't look it, but she can be sensitive. Korim's been pulling off better facial expressions lately, so I thought I'd kick it up a notch and make 'em go BAM like Emeril.

Time-wise the sun's still making the big rise in the sky, so the theme in this issue is orange. Lotsa orange.. Dust clouds.. Oh, and rim-lighting! Korim asked me to put in some more of that ala HTK, but not as in-your-face since he knew it bugged me that it was an oft-abused technique and all. I said "ok", and did it sparingly just enough to help pop out more objects against the lighting. There's a whole buttload of back-lighting action going on in #4, so making out the shapes was really important.

I noticed there was this funny trend where in each issue there were double page spreads on 2-3 and 22-23. It got broken as of now, there's just one of them this time on a different page. *GASP! Reduced lag times on the computer! Whootages!

Some of the technical problems behind issue 4 were another story. Korim was sick in the middle of all the winter downs when I accidentally killed my Graphire 2 with some static electricity. We had roughly a week until the deadline on top of that.

While panicking/waiting for more pages I got me an emergency replacement tablet, a Wacom Bamboo Fun, which oddly enough made me think of pole-dancing pandas. It was alright, but the texture on the tablet surface wore down the pen nib like crazy, just using it for three days wore it down by almost half. Then there were those irritating driver glitches where the response got cramped and sluggish at random times, new driver or no. Usually that bit was easily remedied with a quick reboot.

I figured out why the USB cable on the Bamboo had two ends, it was so you could easily unplug and plug it back in whenever it tried to sneak back into crappy default mode. Also made a somewhat-wonderful discovery: my Graphire 2 pen works on a Bamboo tablet. So yay! I have a spare!

Time was a little tight on issue 4 because we had to prioritize the FCBD short. Luckily Paul helped buy some time because Troy was generous enough to give us an extra 4 days to finish off #4 and the short, given he's been busy juggling lettering duties on other titles. Sorry for cutting it so close every time. Thanks man, we owe you one.