I couldn't stop smiling the whole read. It was that sense of discovery, incitement of wonder. I said "wow" out loud several times. The colors and contrast and vistas made eye candy indeed. My two favorite panels were the view of the entire Bliss Harbor and the downward view of the Tittering Tower, resplendent with veined green marble columns and a lovely vantage point. I liked the purpose of the Tittering tower even more.
A great joy to read another of your trademark extensive, insightful, fun replies, Lee! I always look forward to your views on the latest Low Roads chapter; a chief annoyance about the long wait it takes me to produce new material is that I have that much longer for your assessment! Thank you for all your kind words concerning the look of this installment! It took more than the usual pains to make Bliss Harbor "glow" just right (while scanning, mostly; you gotta lighten the exposure enough so that light sources become halo-esque, but not so much that colors loose their richness and the text gets washed out and hard to read, blah blah blah…). I consider the two images you site to be the "money shots" of the piece, so I couldn't be more gratified that you single them out! The high-angle view of the Tittering Tower is my favorite (actually, I have a few problems with the city long-shot. But it took days to finish and I wasn't about to try again on a tight schedule to probably negligible improvement). I'm so pleased you made mention of the marble columns! I really enjoyed making that veined effect and am super-happy about the way it looks! Originally, those pillars were supposed to be an extension of the silvery platform material… what a waste that would have been!
I could be wrong, but some of the dialog balloons seemed larger than I remembered seeing before, (or maybe the ratio of text to art in one panel) yet they were not distracting from the art, a nice mix between reading a book and viewing art. I always thought the disappointing thing about some comic books and graphic novels was how quickly you could read them. Here I could savor both the dialog and the graphics.
Thank you! I set great store by the written aspect of the comic (the script can take up to a month to shape. I just get worse and worse about it!), so this compliment is particularly appreciated! It's entirely possible that there were more large-size dialogue sessions in this chapter; there certainly was plenty to describe and explain. I always manage one or two bloated-up word balloons per chapter, like the ones on page 8 where images have to be squeezed into about a quarter of the panel. Running-off-at-the-mouth dialogue can be pleasing to write (makes for an easy-to-illustrate panel, too), and can serve a useful purpose if it happens to occur during a fetish scene; the longer one spends reading the text, the longer the tickling seems to take! Saves wear and tear on pencils!
I loved the core tree idea. Bliss Harbor definitely came across as a bioluminescent Las Vegas style Disneyland After Dark. I want to go there. I want that vacation destination. Bliss Harbor has the advantage of being a natural wonder, without the inherent dangers of human invention, though, as you pointed out in commentary, dependency on one system is dangerous. ( Not unlike our electric grid, single DNA crops, agribusiness mega farming, hmmm... efficiencies of scale are reducing the safety of redundancy.)
Yeah, I'd definitely love to live close enough to visit regularly! Not to live
in it, necessarily (any more than I'd prefer to dwell in any town; I'm a farm boy at heart, with sparse rural landscapes suited perfectly to my personality), but certainly close enough to pop in when I was in the mood for high-end shopping or for fetish fun (well, maybe it should be within walking distance, then!) Your observation about the core tree's natural benefits is telling; I conceived the idea after watching some documentary material about living bridges in India, where locals train roots into a latticework of raised walkways to see them past the monsoon floods. The extrapolation isn't too terribly outlandish, though it would require a greater degree of cooperation (probably gene spicing, too) than any real-world tree could possibly provide. It would likely require a measure of arboreal sentience, too… of course, some Earth Firsters would claim they already have it.
I enjoyed and often shared Angie's responses. I enjoyed the re-appreciation of the magic of movies and animation. I was reminded of the early movie "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" in 1895 (thanks google) where legend has it that many of the patrons ran in fear of the approaching train.
Good for you, snagging the film title! I know the footage (it was expounded on prominently at the beginning of my college cinematography course, years and years ago), but I would have had tons of trouble pinpointing it now! If I'd been a little more persistent, I might have worked in motion pictures (it was certainly my ambition for awhile) and cinematic entertainment is still a cherished pastime, so Angie's premier trip to the movie theater was a very personal moment for me! Though I was never as confounded about cartoons as she managed to be; my brother and I did flip-book animation a long time before I ever associated it with the stuff up on the screen. That managed to dispel much of the mystery. Puppet animation was another story (I didn't figure that out until
much later!)
I enjoyed Chastity and Charity, the two new "sisters of contrast" in name and character, but only now am I wondering if there are analogies to Mercy and Angie. I'll have to think about that. Blue Powder vs Bliss Harbor, Chastity vs Charity, Mercy vs Angie... I saw the visual graphics contrast, but I hadn't thought about the sheer number of contrasting themes and how they might interrelate, despite other's comments about them. This is why I should start reading novels again instead of all technical and political books. I think you can lose a certain literary awareness, a kind of thoughtful overarching analysis that can be an antidote to television soundbites and thirty second commercials.
Yeah… I'd like to get back to novel reading myself someday. There's no hold quite like the gripping suspense a page-turner can generate… I've really missed it. At the moment, though, this comic doesn't give me much time for any other sort of competing leisure. And I'm determined to finish the blasted thing! I'm damn near into my 60s… there may not be much productive time left!
I'm very pleased you like Chastity and Charity! I'm always fond of the story's neophyte characters, but then I have a personal rooting interest and can't be depended on to judge them dispassionately. While its true that many of the series' interrelationships have formed into pairs, I suspect this was done for narrative expediency rather than to highlight any sort of thematic dichotomy (a lone character can't have very many enlightening conversations). I'm not a big fan of "writing" thematics; message entertainment is generally a drag to sit through. Nothing annoys me quite so much as fiction that informs the reader how he ought to react to a subject or situation. Readers aren't dummies and shouldn't be preached at. I prefer it when an author present incident in a straightforward way, then let his audience figure out how to interpret it. I figure that if I've imagined my characters thoroughly enough and have the story unfold authentically and unforced, thematics will surface naturally without being prodded. Everyone has a personal perspective; it's darned near impossible to keep it from imprinting itself on narrative incident, so there's no point in being obvious about it. Actually, I don't think this diatribe directly addresses the point you raised; it was something I wanted to get it off my chest, though!
Thank you for your graphics and literary efforts.
Lee
Thank you for making the exercise so much fun, Lee! I intend to get right back to work on Chapter 26, that I might hear from you again all the sooner!
