Commentary
for July 18, 2022:
That first
panel took a ludicrous amount of doing before I got it right, but
I’m reasonably satisfied with the end result. I had thought of
recolouring the E-1000 Badniks into some kind of stealth colour
scheme, but I couldn’t really settle on a colour that worked, so I
just decided not to bother.
Now we come to the part of this chapter I was most invested in
getting right, which is the debate itself. First of all, the
auditorium. I had considered trying to repurpose a 3D model of an
auditorium I’d made for Chapter 3 of Vol. 2 like nine years ago. I’m
sure I could have made it work, but the very old model proved
too unwieldy and would have just caused me too much frustration to
use, so I opted to keep it simple and just use 2D game background
elements and pixel art. I still managed to get some depth into the
stage this way, and the setup is pretty faithful to the version of
this story told in the 2018 remaster, particularly with the
candidates’ faces being blown up and projected onto a big screen
behind them. That was the most important visual element I wanted for
this chapter, and you’ll see why in a couple of pages.
Scarlet Garcia, the woman in the orange suit standing between the
candidates, is there as the moderator. Her job is to keep the
candidates on topic, deliver questions from the audience, and step
in if things get heated. She is, of course, a news presenter from
official Sonic fiction, who appeared in Sonic X, and she’s
one of the few elements from that show I’ve featured in Eon’s World.
But hey, I needed a news presenter at some point in Eon’s Comic and
why create someone new when the Sonic franchise already has someone?
You may recall that she also moderated the debate between the
candidates for the United Federation presidential election in
Chapter 5, so it’s kind of her thing when she’s not being SSTV’s
field correspondent. In any case, I needed new sprites for her and I
went out of my way to try and make her look as close to the anime I
could. I think I did okay. The funny thing is, throughout this whole
debate, she never steps in, so her standing there might look a
little odd; but I decided I wanted to just have the two candidates
having a back and forth with each other at this stage, a little bit
like the famous debate episode of ‘The West Wing’, I guess. (Of
course, I wasn’t ever going to do a whole chapter solely dedicated
to a single presidential debate like in ‘The West Wing’. Sure,
I’d enjoy that and I think one or two of my readers would; but
it’s not the kind of storytelling I’m going for here.)
Anyway, I guess I should address what the candidates are debating. I
could have invented a bunch of sci-fi baloney for them to disagree
over, a bunch of fake issues that only apply in this fictional
setting, and there’s definite precedent for this. Civil rights for
Mobians, for instance, are definitely an issue in this setting and I
could have had them focus on that. But I wanted them to address more
grounded issues, things that may resonate with real people in the
real world. This is why they’re talking about whether or not the
taxpayer’s money is being properly spent on art, science, and the
welfare state, because real world concerns like this do still apply
in a fictional setting. |
