Chapter 1: Page 18
This week, Quinlan introduces himself to those present and is about to get brought up to speed on what’s important enough to drag a high-ranking military officer from the neighboring city of Lutra into the Tamian king’s throne room.
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Quinlan once again proves that he’s a bit inept when it comes to socializing – those blasted sashes seem to fold over on themselves while you’re not looking!
King Dabheid’s throne room went through a number of iterations before we settled on its current design – probably moreso than any other room we’ve designed thus far. Originally, the throne room was nicely carpeted with the oak leaf banners making a more prominent appearance along the sides of the room. Strangely, we’d gone with lit torches (inside a tree?) and no security for the king whatsoever.
The throne room in the original pitch
It wasn’t the most compelling of spaces, so Rachel began to brainstorm alternatives to this approach. We talked quite a bit about what would make sense for the king to have in his ground-level throne room, which would no doubt need to be visually impressive to give the foreign dignitaries something to talk about, but would also need to be practical. After all the king would need to sit there for several hours at a time – even if he is a Tamian and has a natural desire to stand up and move around.
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This throne is a little closer to the final concept, with Dabheid separated physically from the goings-on in front of him. Ultimately we decided to connect the throne area and the spot where visitors stand in the final version, which certainly fits better with Dabheid’s personality and mannerisms. As you can see from the pages, he is not the type to simply sit around while his company stands. Even with considerable bulk, a Tamian has to move around to avoid becoming restless, and Dabheid is meant to be a very personable sort.
We also removed the torches (fire hazard!), and Rachel considered the idea of a special kind of lightning bug that emitted a powerful-enough glow that it would be practical to enclose a number of them as a semi-permanent light source.
As I promised last week, I’ll dive into a bit of Kenosh – though I’ll actually be saving a bit for next week:
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Kenosh, as you may have noticed from his Character biography in the Characters section at the top of the site, is rather no-nonsense. A hardened war veteran and close friend of Quinlan’s grandfather, he believes in honor above all else, even with matters concerning his own kingdom. While he only appears in two panels in this week’s page, you may already be able to tell that he is not the sort to suffer fools – even fools with whom he is familiar.
We’ll learn more about Kenosh next week, when we begin to learn just what it is that’s brought these two Lutren emissaries to the Tamian capital of Terria!
Wow, Kenosh and Dakkan, great design work there! It feels like we are about to get up to speed and into the plot of the story.
LOL! I love the whole sash thing! “I was just ah…Donning the proper attire!” His face is so hopeful, like ‘I hope he believes this!’ Over all, the awesomeness continues…
Like Ireland Ranger said, Quinlan in the middle panels, especially the fifth one, looks absolutely hilarious! It’s a truly brilliant comedic touch, and the look on his face as he adjusts his sash just cracks me up every time. In fact, we’re gonna get quite a lot of awesome expressions in the coming scene. As always, Quin is just freakin’ adorable!
I already talked extensively of what I thought of the throne room last page, so I don’t have too much to add to the issue here except saying that you’re reasoning behind the design seems solid.
I guess Dabheid still tries to remain active in spite of his girth. That actually leads me to a question – do the Tamians have prisons? Given how they have an in-built need for activity and exercise, I guess they would consider that a rather cruel punishment.
The design on Kenosh is also great. His pictures in the sketch remind me quite a lot of one of Hardin’s Ermehn companions (can’t remember his name right now), which I guess makes sense since they’re both mustelids.
I only have one complaint with this scene: where are the guards? Last time, we saw that Dabheid was flanked by two well-armed Tamians standing quite close to his throne, but for most of the upcoming pages they seem completely absent, even where we should see them. If you want to change certain pages of the comic in the future, as you’ve hinted, that’s one detail I’d have you take a look at.
I agonized over those stupid guards at the time, haha. They were consistently left out of frame because as the scene went forward, there was just no room for them in most of the panels. In the first panel, for example, maintaining accurate spatial relationships would put a guard right between Quin and Dabheid – an area I wanted open for speech bubbles and the clarity of having them directly face each other. Since then I’ve discovered a couple tricks that might have helped put the guard there without having him disrupt the composition too much? I don’t want to get stuck in a cycle of redoing Chapter 1 forever though, so I may have to prioritize only the errors that annoy us the most Ones that actively interfere with the storytelling.
And certainly, pacing is a very difficult beast to tame when it comes to a long-format story like this. There’s week-to-week pacing, and then there’s long-term, “archive binge” pacing, as if you were reading it in a printed book. I optimize the script for the best week-to-week pacing possible, but if there’s ever a question when it comes to making a choice, I’ll favor the long-term pacing every time.