Comic 946 - Blue Blazes, Page 9
17th Mar 2020, 11:00 PM
in Blue Blazes
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Author Notes:
Her design's been tweaked a bit to make her pop some since her debut... A major influence on her was Haruko from FLCL, who was a rock-chick, so we tried to put a lot of punk rocker elements into her design now. That's also why she's riding a bike through the city now. You'll also notice she has a black cape draped over one shoulder and a glove on her left hand; both are nods to the end of her last fight with Marvelous Man, when she kept the cape he draped over her and got her hand blown off. Where the new one came from will become clear shortly.
The one commentator to guess Decay Conductor supposed she might be pissed that Marvelous Man was beaten by a bunch of kids, but I thought this approach was sort of more fun; she's one of the few people willing to give the kids full credit for their win. She not only appreciated seeing the guy lose but knew what talent it took to make it happen, so she gives them a full endorsement. Meaning she gives the kids more praise for it than their own parents do!
Grant being the only one to recognize the Decay Conductor was Martin's idea; make sense he'd have knowledge of super-villains as well as heroes. ^^
As Martin said, we tried to fluff up the hair and make it more expressive... Favorite on this are probably Valerie and Lore. ^^ Very inexact science to it, and really been hard to get the hang of.
Comments:
Wolfintina
18th Mar 2020, 12:04 AM
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Decay Conductor was the other person I thought the villain could be but she looks so different I had a hard time realizing it was her, oh boy what in the world is going to happen now.
We were actually a little worried for a bit as to whether anybody remembered Decay Conductor, given it kind of felt like we were making it obvious for a long time she was coming back soon but no one really seemed to be biting. Top of my head, there's this last anniversary picture -
bluebloodheroes.thecomicseries.com/comics/845/
Was a relief when a reader brought her up recently given that. Hoping people like what's to come with her, she's a character we really enjoy doing stuff with and we're hoping this sequence is going to be a lot of fun. If anyone's curious here's the panel from where we were originally going to show her at the start of the chapter, which should be noted was before we decided (well, it was honestly mostly me doing it) to redesign her face paint, and it was replaced before the page was entirely wrapped up.
On another note, if the hair looks a little weird on this page, we've been experimenting with fluffing it up more lately and this was one of our first times doing it so that might take a bit to level out. Speaking of experimenting, this page was actually finished very last minute - I did most of the work for it ahead of the time, but put off coloring the backgrounds because Adam wanted to redo the smoke. That didn't really wound up being fit in though so instead I just came around and did it myself along with the rest of the page.
Speaking of the smoke, isn't that a huge improvement? Something I've long hated doing and never thought could quite get to look right, and when I was coloring the next page I pretty much just had an extended breakdown of trying to figure out how to finally make it look decent. Spent ages doing that, but when I did hit on a winning method there, it was pretty easy to integrate it back into this one. Though actually made it a bit too thick at first and had to turn down the opacity of the layer in post a little - originally Nicky and Decay Conductor were almost entirely covered up as opposed to just mostly.