Heheh..... Yeah, look at how awesome Jake looks in this page. There's always this element of "We haven't seen this character in a long time, how do they look with the evolved art?" except now we're doing it with a major chraacter everybody knows and loves. The guy just absolutely pops every time he's on screen. Beard's also growing on me the more I see him in it.
But Jake's history as an unstoppable cool guy who's faced all kinds of bizarre threats is critical in killing the Night Terror, so naturally we get a brief flashback to a past adventure. Tried to go really out-there and bizarre with both the images and the dialog, just make it look trippy as possible. The line "Only a dream can kill a dream" is a reference to Big Trouble In Little China, mostly because I can see him having gone on a similar bizarre adventure in his past.
When we did the Anniversary picture, a lot of folks on the Discord noticed that Jake had a lock. Yeah, we'd had that planned so it was great to see folks immediately recognize it; Jake summing it up as locking up "humanity" is a great little touch too; guy clearly knows what it does, and only says it in a way that you get if you know what it is.
Speaking of the anniversary picture, Jake's spear is much, MUCH less detailed in the comic proper. The reasoning is that it took me friggin' forever to draw that spear just once, so I just nixed that more incredible design and went with something more mundane looking. Given Jake's "diamond in the rough" sort of persona, it kinda makes sense his weapons would look unimpressive. I did that it's a spear and not a sword, like you'd normally have for this kind of job.
This is a little bit of a weird page in the broader scope of the chapter; we're not really diverting away from the combat for very long in actuality, but it kind of feels like it in the moment due to the scene change. Granted I guess that really happened in the last page but...
Eh. In either case, this one kind of occupies a weird little in-between that probably isn't even all that obvious when it comes to the art; we've been working on changing up how we do faces lately (among other things) and part of that has been adding details to the pupils to make them have more depth. All of the eyes in this page are so small that I'm not sure how noticeable it even is, but it's something that'll probably make itself more apparent in the next one along with other changes we've been working at. This one also stands out because it wasn't drawn with it in mind; I'd done it on the couple pages after this and Adam decided to add it to this one while shading it.
It doesn't really show but I tried to color that person in Jake's flashback to have a night elf kind of look, thought it'd make for something different. Wound up mostly covered up, but plus side I like how that rainbow blood looks.
... Speaking of weirdly-colored blood I'm kind of still just riding the high of them finally announcing Danganronpa Switch ports.
But Jake's history as an unstoppable cool guy who's faced all kinds of bizarre threats is critical in killing the Night Terror, so naturally we get a brief flashback to a past adventure. Tried to go really out-there and bizarre with both the images and the dialog, just make it look trippy as possible. The line "Only a dream can kill a dream" is a reference to Big Trouble In Little China, mostly because I can see him having gone on a similar bizarre adventure in his past.
When we did the Anniversary picture, a lot of folks on the Discord noticed that Jake had a lock. Yeah, we'd had that planned so it was great to see folks immediately recognize it; Jake summing it up as locking up "humanity" is a great little touch too; guy clearly knows what it does, and only says it in a way that you get if you know what it is.
Speaking of the anniversary picture, Jake's spear is much, MUCH less detailed in the comic proper. The reasoning is that it took me friggin' forever to draw that spear just once, so I just nixed that more incredible design and went with something more mundane looking. Given Jake's "diamond in the rough" sort of persona, it kinda makes sense his weapons would look unimpressive. I did that it's a spear and not a sword, like you'd normally have for this kind of job.