Surprise! He's not going through the rift after all!
I'm sure there's some pun to be made here, about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat... CHOMP!
This page was a lot of fun to draw, and was produced a little faster than usual, probably due to the lack of backgrounds. If you've been reading the comic regularly up to this point, you've probably noticed that I don't like to skimp on drawing backgrounds. I think that's mainly due to the influence of my career in animation. I spent many years as an animation layout artist, and that job is all about placing a character within a background - you HAVE to draw them.
When I would draw my own comics as a kid, I absolutely hated drawing backgrounds, but when you're expected to do it as part of your job, you learn to like it, and to actually use the background as an integral element of a composition. Now it feels weird for me not to draw a background - that's the reason that I still didn't leave any panel with just white space around the figures here.
I guess my animation influence is also showing up in the three wide panels in the middle of the page. I tried to make it as clear as possible what's happening here - even going so far as to just add the word "WINCH" over and over - it doesn't exactly work as onomatopoeia, but it think it does help (hopefully) to clarify that he's rolling his head around, using it like a spool to wind himself back to the walkway.
I'm sure there's some pun to be made here, about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat... CHOMP!
This page was a lot of fun to draw, and was produced a little faster than usual, probably due to the lack of backgrounds. If you've been reading the comic regularly up to this point, you've probably noticed that I don't like to skimp on drawing backgrounds. I think that's mainly due to the influence of my career in animation. I spent many years as an animation layout artist, and that job is all about placing a character within a background - you HAVE to draw them.
When I would draw my own comics as a kid, I absolutely hated drawing backgrounds, but when you're expected to do it as part of your job, you learn to like it, and to actually use the background as an integral element of a composition. Now it feels weird for me not to draw a background - that's the reason that I still didn't leave any panel with just white space around the figures here.
I guess my animation influence is also showing up in the three wide panels in the middle of the page. I tried to make it as clear as possible what's happening here - even going so far as to just add the word "WINCH" over and over - it doesn't exactly work as onomatopoeia, but it think it does help (hopefully) to clarify that he's rolling his head around, using it like a spool to wind himself back to the walkway.
I'm pretty happy with how this page came out.