Page 5 has Hanna scared and alone in the forest doing the only thing she can think of, Calling the Thornwatch. We've spoken of them before on the site and even did a little three part comic based on them. The comic was from the point of view of the Lookouts though and they see the Thornwatch as oath breakers and criminals. Boys are warned to never call the Thornwatch no matter how dire their situation is.
Page 4 of the Tithe is one of my favorites. You’re not always able to get exactly what’s in your head out on the page. On this page though I feel like I hit all the emotions I was after. Here’s a look at my sketchbook for this page.
So, there are some strange things about our division of labor that can result in interesting outcomes.
Page 3 is up today and I have another high res panel for you.
Oh ho, who's this? Why yes, now that you ask, I am obsessed with the Triple Goddess. Between this and the sixth issue of the comic series, you've got some fairly strong datapoints there. There's a page later in the series I want to talk about, but I can't, which is sort of weird or me. As my cohort suggested previously, we are way ahead of the game on this project. We'd be way ahead by any reckoning, but specifically for us, it's almost inconceivable. We make comics seven to ten hours before they're required. That I would have knowledge of any kind about upcoming strips feels like prescience.
Jesus. So, we've got tons and tons of people sending in their versions of Hanna's song from the strip. Like, tons. I could not be more pleased. A capella versions, also guitar, mandolin, autoharp (my mom had an autoharp!), banjo, and I swear to GOD I have a hammer dulcimer version in here. Everybody has their own melody. That means I can hack in another section, and they will have twice as much song with virtually no work on their side. Plus, singing for another person is incredibly scary, and I want to honor that. If she had kept singing, it would sound like this:
There are five strips total, but the first one just went up. I would describe this project as deeply, just... fundamentally batshit, and it was a ton of fun to have her take over the art duties.
I posted ie a while back but if you’re looking for a nice high res version of the first panel in today’s strip here it is:
The Lookouts tells the story of what it’s like to be a young boy in the Eyrewood. It’s essentially fantasy boy scouts and almost immediately after the first strip we were asked if there was a girl scout equivalent in that world. It was actually a fan that gave us the name Daughters of the Eyrewood but it’s taken us a few years to figure out exactly what their story is.
Any spare minute where we were not in, you know, Australia or something, Gabriel has been drawing Daughters of the Eyrewood: The Tithe. I don't think it looks like he drew it. Obviously, that's not my department. I don't have a robust methodology for determining things like that. But looking at it, with the organs I use for that purpose, it clearly represents a change either in him or in his style.
There have been a lot of assumptions about what I meant or thought at the panel last Monday. I wanted to clear that up, so get ready, let’s talk about Dickwolves.
God help me. God helps us all.
I’ve been playing a ton of Rayman Legends on the Wii U for the last two days. This game is fucking incredible. The way it uses the Wii U gamepad is nothing short of genius. I’ve been playing it with my wife, me taking on the platforming while she handles the touch controls on the gamepad. If you played the demo you know that the person on the gamepad can do cool stuff like cut ropes to lower platforms or stamp out fireballs before they reach you.
PAX is over now and I’m at home recovering. It was an incredible four days and I wanted to share some of my highlights.
I would have gotten here a lot sooner if it weren't for Cookie Clicker. Man, fuck that guy. You work so hard to ennoble play and craft and systems as aesthetics and whatever other Goddamn thing, but if you put a cookie on the screen and ask me to click it I will apparently do that for hours and fucking hours. I'm creating three and a half million cookies per second and it feels like the apex of human achievement. I stand atop a cookie ziggurat, my arms outstretched; chocolate lightning strikes both palms.