I am simultaneously pumped and terrified to finally share this chapter with you guys. Let me know what you think! Constructive feedback is welcome. Once the material is too old for critiques, I’ll remove this note. Until then, please feel free to post critiques in the comments.
Aaaand with that, Chapter 3: Loved Ones comes to an end. I will be taking a little break before the next chapter begins. See you on March 26th, when the story will be continued in chapter four!
PS. Teasers will be posted via Twitter (@keiiii4) to tide you over in the meantime, so feel free to follow me there!
1. Different writing. The scene with the wyrm, for instance, didn’t exist in the first draft, so I had to draw the whole thing not too long before posting them here.
2. VERY ugly old art. The part where Ethan opens the outhouse door here? Even though I’d promised myself I would only redraw scenes that were written differently, I had to break that promise. It was a special kind of hideous. Just trust me on that one.
It’s usually #1. The writing differences may be subtle, but they’re just different enough to prevent me from recycling old art.
The art for this particular strip is about 50% old, the highest out of the entire Chapter Three. I hope the old art here isn’t too jarring…
Also, daily suyori maintenance job means not everyone can afford to have a glorious, shiny, moldy, odor-free outhouse. No one else in the village has it. Danbi feels bad for being the only one who has it. Because he’s been using an odor-free outhouse all his life, however, a smelly outhouse squicks him out MAJORLY.
If he were visiting someone else in another town, and his host didn’t have a nice moldy outhouse, he would honestly prefer to go behind a bush. Or possibly bring some pine branches and magic up the piney scent to the max, as a gift to the host (not that the scent would last long). He prefers not to hurt the trees too much, though, if he can help it.
Here we start seeing bits of old art from the first version, which was never released in English. We will be seeing more of it throughout this scene. Hope the oldness doesn’t stand out too much…
Panel one: I’d drawn Ethan turning halfway to Danbi, but what’s the point of showing the turning? There’s no significance to it. So a close-up on the stretched out hand it is.
Panel three used to be two panels: Danbi’s expression going from a restrained ‘yay’ to ‘ohnoes.’ But I’ve already done something vaguely similar at the end of Chapter 2, when Danbi was struggling to find words (although there were no ‘ohnoes’ involved in that one). Plus, this little scene is not about Danbi. It’s all about Ethan making his decision. Going with Danbi may seem like a no-brainer, but finding a personal reason to do so — something beyond a simple ‘well, I don’t belong here’ — took him a bit of introspection.
Panel four: oh boy, I think I redrew the background three times. I needed Danbi to stand on that side of the yard, i.e. facing his house, in order for the next update to follow smoothly. But I wasn’t thinking about it at first, and drew the house on the top side of the panel. Oops. Took me two more redraws to orient the characters properly.
And the darkness in the gutter toward the bottom. That took WAY longer than it should have! Abstract composition is hard, guys.
An interesting tidbit: Ethan has not used his desktop computer for months. He has it packed away in a box for interesting reasons that I may or may not explain later. He does use the Internet daily on his phone, though (or rather, he used to before he came to Keol).