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July 24, 2019 |
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Commentary for July 24, 2019: A page like this would have been inconceivable to me when I was first creating Eon’s Comic many years ago. By the end of the first page, I’d settled on the 3x6 grid pattern and had an established panel size of 240x160 pixels, the same as a Gameboy Advance screen (which made sense, since so many game backgrounds I used were from GBA games and any that weren’t could easily be edited to fit anyway, since pretty much all game backgrounds from that era were built out of 16x16 pixel tile sets). The only time I changed this was when I permanently increased the size of panels to 304x208 pixels in 2006; but with only one exception (the double length 500th page from May, 2007), I never deviated from the 3x6 grid pattern. Every page was 18 equally sized panels long. Coming to this remake, I fully expected each page (roughly equivalent to one third of a page from the original) to follow a 2x3 grid pattern as faithfully as the original followed the 3x6 one. But then I did Chapter 4, where I found two occasions that worked better with a double width panel. Here I’ve found use for that again, but also for a couple of smaller panels -- basically a single panel cut in half. But it doesn’t stop with panel size and shape here. One thing I avoided doing with the original sprite comic was close ups, zooming in on a character like in panels 2 and 3 here. I avoided this because it makes the characters all pixely, which I didn’t want. That’s also the reason I never blew up the panels for the comic before this remaster, even when it would have made it easier to read the damn thing. But, having elected to remake Eon’s Comic as Eon's World Vol. 1 with bigger panels, and bigger, clearer text, I’ve found that enlargement really doesn’t hurt the images. Sure, the pixels may be more obvious at this resolution, but who was I ever kidding? It’s a sprite comic. It’s made of pixel art. And I’m immensely satisfied with how panels 2 and 3 turned out anyway. I’ll probably experiment more with shots like those going forwards. Anyway, Dragon Slave! Yes, Lina Inverse’s ridiculously overpowered signature spell from Slayers, which CJ may have also used in the recently concluded Chapter 9 of Vol. 2 (which is set a little under ten years after these events). CJ’s magic was originally based solely on spells from Slayers, like Dragon Slave, Fireball, Explosion Array, etc. I later expanded it a wee bit based on magic from The Elder Scrolls (specifically, Oblivion) and nowadays it’s largely based on magic from Dungeons and Dragons, with a couple of notable additions from other sources, like this one. To create a fantastic setting that’s still believable, it’s best to keep its internal rules consistent, so it will be based mostly on D&D going forwards. But I digress. For this scene, I knew I wanted to really showcase just how powerful Dragon Slave is. That’s hard to do in a sprite comic, but I knew I could do a better than the original Eon's Comic version of this story, where it only caused a tiny bit of damage to the ARK and a character was able to outrun without a scratch. I couldn’t stand for that in this remake, which is why I made it destroy a mech and a large part of the chamber CJ is in, even affecting the observation room Horatio and his lackeys were watching from, and presumably rocking the entire station (which, I should note, is about 10 kilometres wide -- not official numbers, I know, but that is the size of the SketchUp model I made for it). Dragon Slave is a powerful spell and, if Horatio had been in the room with CJ, a monitor exploding in his face would be the least of his concerns. |
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Eon's World is a fan comic created by Bethany Turner. All characters are copyright
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to their respective creators. The contents of this site are not
public domain material and should not be edited, distributed, or
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