Of all the casually superhuman feats Vish has performed, I think climbing a metal wall in a Zaiapani business suit and ballroom pumps is one of the more impressive.

An outdated, upside-down Ulenite airship suspended by vines over a ravine was about as difficult to draw as I thought it was going to be. I’m not entirely satisfied with the result, but I didn’t flip my desk in a rage while trying to draw it, so that’s pretty good.

One thing I’ve tried to work on in this issue is, I guess, “branding.” This is something I should have thought harder about when first starting WPK, but I’m still not a very visual thinker, so remembering to add symbols for different groups–the inn’s silver leaf, the slaving triskelion, the cruciform symbol on Vish’s staff and Anthem’s tabard–requires constant attention. I just finished the latest Zelda game and, despite the weaknesses of Skyward Sword‘s visual design, characters are exceptionally well-branded by repeated symbols, motifs, and designs. It’s something I want to focus on.

I think that was actually a wasp.

I really wanted to draw one of those ash-corpses getting crushed. Ah well.

And I’m not going to lie to you, gentle readers: I really love drawing heads getting smashed. Traumatic head injury is one of my favorite things. Like, I much prefer writing to drawing, but I think I prefer drawing heads getting pulped to either writing or (regular) drawing.

I probably should have used more references for that lizard-guy. As-is, he looks like a koopa or something.

This list of hazy and disconnected thoughts brought to you by “I forgot to buy coffee yesterday and now I can’t wake up.”

While drawing this I kept thinking the same thought: imagine how cool this would look if a pro artist were drawing it! The swirling ash, the blackened corpses…man, it’d be pretty swell.

In cheerier news, ComicPress tells me this is my 400th post in this comic, which is pretty cool.

I think I pace my comics very strangely. I blame Alan Moore, because I might as well blame the best.

In Moore’s Writing for Comics, he talks about one particular story he wrote, a 40-page Superman tale with two interlinked plots: first, Superman’s hallucination of living on a non-destroyed Krypton, and second, a more action-packed story about Superman’s friends attempting to free from this delusion. Moore packs a stupendous amount of information into his little pamphlet, and I somehow got it into my head that that’s how comics should be written: they’re about 40 pages long, and they have an A plot and a B plot.

Of course, most conventional comics are 22 pages long and they don’t have plots; they just have scenes. (We’ll leave that rant for another time.) What I’ve been trying to write, in my own confused way, is a television episode. I have no idea if this is a good way to produce a comic story, since I’m much too close to my plots to tell how well they flow, but at least I’ve learned this: having stories of a roughly fixed length keeps plots from attenuating forever. Quite a few good dramatic webcomics are suffering from Zeno’s Paradox plotting, as they approach but never quite reach the resolution of one or more major plot points. Forcing upon myself cutoff points after 40-50 pages clears out the underbrush of subplots and prevents my stories from calcifying.

There’s been some suggestion in the webcomics community about getting rid of the term “webcomics.” After all, almost everything is on the “web” nowadays, comics included, and the term is starting to seem redundant or even a little dated, like how people in the 50s stuck “electro-” in front of everything. But there’s one good reason to keep the term “webcomics” for a while yet: positive branding. Webcomics are on their way up. They’re associated with young, energetic trademarks like Penny Arcade and Girl Genius. Comics by contrast are associated with two things: 1) the fast-dying newspaper strips, which have been a laughingstock since the nineties and which are tethered to a doomed industry, and 2) the insular and distasteful world of the superhero floppies, which are increasingly regarded as the province of middle-aged male collectors with deeply troubling attitudes toward women.

Purely from a branding standpoint, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to dropping “web” just yet.

Back to the inn!

Not happy with how the faces turned out on this page.

So this page turned out pretty-okay.

Oh, I have a cool thing for you. It’s this guy doing The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Amazing, detailed inkwork, and he’s already posted some stories like this one.

Seriously, this is some stunning inkwork. One of the things I’ve learned after even a few years of drawing is that good inking is more than just copying an object’s outline. Skilled inkwork distinguishes among different materials–wood, ivory, stone, metal–with a few flourishes of the pen, without having to resort to heavy-handed Photoshop manipulation and patterns. It’s an extraordinary skill (one I certainly haven’t mastered), and one that’s appreciated less and less as major comic books increasingly rely on heavy-handed coloring techniques. And it’s a hard skill to master, since (in my experience at least) there’s a lot of trial and error involved. How do you ink a metal control panel that looks different from a granite floor? I have no idea, so I end up fiddling around hoping to get lucky, or flipping through books filled with good inking and hoping to hit upon something I can try to mimic. It’s a laborious and finicky process that exercises a different part of the brain from basic perspective and anatomy.