Hey, my Squids!
Recently, I told you all about the “Definitive” versions of Chapter 1 and 2, so I wanted to follow-up on that as well as tell you about some Chapter 3 rumblings and extra documents that support this growing little webcomic of mine.
For a quick refresher, I’m going back and tweaking some of the dialogue and captions across Chapters 1 and 2 so that they better align with how Leira, Micah, and Xolani talk, interact, and their thoughts in the moment. I talk more about this in this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/definitive-1-and-145253864 The biggest change is that Leira speaks her native tongue, Abaroguian, a few times during those two chapters so that it is more apparent Procolish (English or what the readers are reading) is her second language, though she is completely fluent in both.
With that out of the way, I can talk a little more about why I brought up the Abaroguian language and Leira speaking it and give a small preview of what Chapter 3 will contain. Chapter 3 starts in the past. We get to see the events that led up to Leira running. With that, we also get to see where Leira lives, in a district that is affectionately called “Little Abarogue,” as it has one of the largest Abaroguian populations outside of the city of Abarogue and the eastern side of Procoline, where Abaroguian is predominantly spoken. We’ll get a glimpse at Abaroguian words on signs and even Leira’s phone. For the last few months, I’ve been working on the Abaroguian language by creating a dictionary, grammar and rules, and much, much more. Abaroguian is entirely made up but it does share some similarities with languages like Spanish and Portuguese. I’ve been lovingly saying it’s like Spanish and Portuguese melded with an Appalachian dialect and had slightly higher tonal values in some of its vowels. With that came some letters that aren’t normally in English (or Procolish) such as à, ÿ, ì, and ò. As I started going back to tweak some of the previous Chapters, I realized that the font I used for dialogue and captions did not have these additions. In fact, several of the fonts I was using did not have these… so it was time to find a new font.
As I was dealing with the font issue and trying to find a font that closely approximated what I was using before, I was thinking about both my dialogue bubbles and my caption boxes. I’ve gotten to a point in the last 20-something pages where the way I do backgrounds and the way I do characters has begun to gel together but especially in the last 5 pages. I was previously color filling a lot of my backgrounds but I’ve been painting them more recently and I think it gives a rougher, more lived-in look to them. I wanted my dialogue and captions to match, so I’ve been in the process of slowly changing them.
Previously, dialogue looked like this. Something I’ve seen in comics I’ve been reading in the last six to eight months that seems to add weight to the words is dialogue overdraw, or where the dialogue goes outside of the bubbles and is lined in the same color as the bubble itself. For instance, in the blue bubble, the color would be around the words, they would be slightly outside of the bubble, and would also be ringed in blue. It works better without there being a border line but I still like it when the border line is there. I thought about incorporating this into my own comic and, while I do like how it looks, it will have to be reserved for “bigger moments” so that it doesn’t feel overused.
However, that led to my second problem. I landed on a font I wanted to use that had the missing characters I required to adequately write in Abaroguian but I needed to bold it so it showed up a little better on a 7″x10″ printed comic page. The problem is that the dialogue bubbles took up way more real estate than they did before. I had to think of a solution.
Then I remembered that I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately with square dialogue bubbles. They save real estate (not in these examples as I overdrew them here but for longer text, absolutely) and tend to look better when you add an overdraw effect to your text. Plus, the font I picked could be reduced in font size and still be readable. Finally!
Afterwards, I decided I was going to work on my captions, as well. I haven’t finalized those just yet but I’ve been toying with the idea that each character will have an emblem that shows up in the captions where they’re narrating. I could even link captions together and have the characters talk to or argue with each other in the narration, as opposed to in the scene, where the argument wouldn’t have happened. Almost like they’re telling you the story at the end and wanting to clarify details, as you do. I haven’t decided if that’s the route I want to go just yet but it could be fun, nonetheless. I do know I want to add a rough border texture to the captions, so I want to iron out how that looks before anything.
All of that to say that Chapter 3 will have a different look for captions and dialogue. While I’m tweaking some of the past dialogue, I may tweak those captions and bubbles, as well. I’ll continue publishing Chapter 2 in the current style but if I do go back to tweak the dialogue bubbles and captions, I’ll fix them up in Chapter 2, too. Like before, I’m not changing the art itself, just some of the overlays.
Now that I’ve talked a little bit about how Chapter 3 will look and what part of it is about, I want to talk release. After December, I have 1 more page of Leira’s story for Chapter 2, and 5 to 7 pages of the next character’s story to wrap up the chapter. I haven’t nailed down the page count for the end of the chapter because I’m still deciding on some key scenes in those pages and whether to stretch them across more pages or condense it. All that said, I want to release Chapter 3 in March but if it slips to April or May, I won’t be mad about it. Now that I’m releasing pages once a month, I have time to partake in art studies, to refine elements of my comic, and even work on things that aren’t comic related. It also means I don’t need to take a 2 month break to plan out the next few pages of the chapter so that Patreon is always pages and pages ahead of public release. Patreon still gets to see things early (sometimes much, much earlier than anyone else) and I won’t have burn out from trying to crank out pages to stay ahead. Chapter 3 will launch the month after Chapter 2 ends with however many pages are available.
Beginning with Chapter 3, I’ll also be removing the appendix from the chapters. It will live as a separate release and be updated much more regularly. While my comics’ first destination is the web, their final destination is print, so page count is a major concern when thinking about my releases. The Appendix takes up part of that page count. By removing it, it is much easier to keep a good page count for the chapter when it goes to print. It also means I can update the Appendix much, much easier and put more entries and information in. The Thank Yous and a few illustrations will still be part of the books but the appendix will live as a separate entry both on GlobalComix, my website, and Patreon. I’ll look at a solution for WebToons soon.
Speaking of separate documents/entries, let’s talk about how Chapter 3 will be released. Like I said before, print is the final destination for my comics, so I draw towards that. However, it’s a webcomic and lives on Patreon, my website, GlobalComix, and Webtoon. Patreon is an … okay delivery system but even all of its options do not make for an overly conducive reading experience, which is one of the reasons why I make a “Definitive” post with all of the pages collated together. Webcomic websites can be a great way to read but I haven’t yet delved into how to make selectable chapters and pages, something I’ll do or need someone else to help with. Webtoon is a vertical webcomic platform, so I have to format the webcomic and release it in episodes. It also means it’s far more time consuming to attempt to go back and add definitive versions of the experience there, so, unfortunately, I won’t be doing that for Webtoon. However, I want to talk about GlobalComix.
Everywhere else works a little like Webtoon: I release a page or pages in series and you’re notified with a new post or a new episode update. For GlobalComix, however, I’ve been adding the pages to the release and appending a “Next Update on Such and Such Date” page for people to mark their calendars to come back. For Chapter 3, I’m making a change. GlobalComix has now added the ability to release pages separately and then collate at the very end. I believe that you lose the “views” once it’s assembled together but my main concern is that people are notified whenever I release new pages, which they weren’t for Chapters 1 and 2. That way regardless of how many pages I publish per month, you’re notified that new pages are up for all of the chapters going forward. And when I do the “definitive” version of Chapter 3 and beyond, I can create a new release that just assembles all of the pages together in the comic book format you would see at a con where I was selling them.
For the very last piece of this update, I wanted to talk about the Abaroguian Language Guide I mentioned earlier. I’m in the process of tweaking all of the reader facing support documentation like the character biographies, plot synopses, and more. I wanted to also publish the language guide for anyone who might be remotely interested in how the Abaroguian language looks and feels. Like I said, Leira speaks and thinks in it all the time, and you’ll find other characters later on who do, as well. There are roughly seven “primary” languages in Taliah but Abaroguian is the main one that is talked about outside of the default “Procolish” that everyone speaks. I thought it would be fun if readers who are fascinated by this type of world building were able to natively read or understand what’s written in the way Leira and other Abaroguian speakers would. As an exercise to help build the dictionary and tweak rules/remember parts of language that we use that I may forget by default, I’m also translating the comic scripts into Abaroguian to eventually publish “Abaroguian Language Comics” of the Taliah comics. Of course, it would probably be a couple years before I published any of those comics but I think it would be neat to have comics in a language that, technically, only the characters in the comic would be able to natively read and understand. Either way, the language guide and the dictionary will go up sooner, rather than later.
And that’s all for this update. Take care and have a great holiday, my Squids!