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The Lord of Ghosts Chapter 3 Sketch pages
🕑 Added 2020-06-01 20:09:05 +0000 UTCI was excited to get to chapter 3 when i was first drawing this. How Lord of Ghosts travelled to NNBTSakaNY was lower on my list of "things that i really want to depict" than WHAT he did when he got there.
Here we see the debut/return of Flowerhead as a new/recycled character. Flowerhead was always a cool idea, an edgy guy with a big silly clipart flower for a head, nothing could undermine a serious disposition more than something as iconically cutesy as that. It'd be like if Guts from berserk wore a Hello Kitty t-shirt all the time. Aka BASED.
Anyway the lore dumps begin, Hippo explains the intricate and well-balanced video game logic by which this shithole city operates, which is basically exactly the same way Endless War operates but with more goopy gross fluids sloshing around in your inventory.
The game mechanics of Endless Mud will probably never become relevant again unless i'm a genius so of course they will. But, for now, Lord of Ghosts is not really a participant in these kinds of games, so we're not likely to see any "gameplay" for a while yet.
This is also the chapter where action really properly begins. I've never drawn action like this before but i feel like i have a knack for it. Things are understandable at least. Having to come up with so many new character designs was difficult though, when i draw that first bricky brawler i wasn't really sure what i wanted the people of this city to look like and made him look kinda forgettable. Later on page 50 i made an effort to come up with some more kooky and unique designs which i think are pretty sick. Some of them may eventually be elevated to "speaking role" characters one day, who knows?
Another thing i had to think about is the power levels. How strong is Flowerhead? Strong enough to easily kill some Mutton Shunters and a giant worm apparently. I wasn't sure if that was setting the bar too high too early, if Flowerhead can do that, what can't he do? What could possibly challenge him in the future? The answer to these questions is that the worm is actually really lame and weak. It can be cut so easily because it's skin is stretched to bursting point from all the blood its eaten. There, i've dodged who knows how many bullets disseminating that information.
I must have talked about this before, but proper sketching is really important. A couple of these panels, specifically the ones where people are running to surround our bois, were so scribbly. It made some of the lineart take much longer than it needed to. Going forward i wont mistakes like that again (except i do for the next four chapters, at least, because i drew all these sketches in one go, last year)
That bit near the end on page 53 where i have Flowerhead's "skive" cut the panels of the page he was on was something i didn't initially think of, you can see there's two versions of it here. The page as i sketched it, initially, felt somewhat lame, so i went back to it and came up with that idea. People really liked how it turned out, so i guess it's important to trust your instincts. If something doesn't feel right, look into it. (Wow, i'm so smart, i bet nobody's thought of that before.)
Well that's about it, i hope this semi-analysis is interesting, otherwise i would feel terribly stupid writing all of it. Do not tell me if you find it uninteresting, i would rather just hope, blindly.
