"I wish I knew what I was doing" Thursday February 14th, 2008

Well here is the "experimental" comic I was talking about in last week's post. If you couldn't figure it out (And I don't blame you if you couldn't), I was trying to make the art is this comic look like Japanese Woodblock Prints. I have always been a fan of the art medium and I LOVE all the woodblock art prints. I think there's something very distinctive about them that puts them apart from other printing methods. Unfortunately I don't think I was able to capture that style digitally very well. I think part of the problem is that I have never done a woodblock print in real life. I have had experience in screen printing and lithography. I spent three semesters worth of schooling in both. To which I can say I thoroughly despise the process and sweat needed to make good prints. I will say this though, the amount of effort makes even the less then perfect prints seem even better. It's easier to do digitally, but because of that I am harder on myself when it doesn't look as good.

I will mention that every color for every panel was all done on separate layers and in the order I would actually lay them down on an actual litho print. the white you see in the prints are places where I kept the color from the background blank. I think some of the panels look a lot better than others. I mean P4 is really bad in my mind, but I', actually kind of pleased with the first two panels and P5. I think the smaller the people are in the image the better they look because the varying length in the line strokes become a lot more distinct and seem to carry more of that Japanese style I was looking for. At any rate, I hope you still enjoyed this foray into the unknown. This had been an idea I was mulling around for a long time and it was originally going to be used in the Misaki Hideyuki Extra Chapter story had that story won instead of Schism before this chapter started. I'll be going back to that normal NS style next week though!

As for the story contained within this chapter, it's basically the myth of creation that is recorded in Japan. It carries alot of themes consistent with a lot of other creation myths and I think it's neat that those themes are very universal through varied cultures. The main bulk of this chapter is dedicated to the story of Izanami's death. This too shares a similar theme found in other myths, most notably the Orpheus one from Greek mythology. Being a very BIG fan of Greek mythology and the manga which used it for it's background in Saint Seiya, I knew early on in the process of creating NS that I had to use this. My original thought was to use it as the Chapter Zero to lay a groundwork for the story. However I wanted to really keep things very light and comedic in the beginning and so I kind of saved it till the moment when the heroes themselves found out about it. If anything at least I was able to share an interesting Japanese myth with all of you.

You'll get to see everyone's reaction to this story in next week's comic. Was this the huge surprise I had planned for all of you? I'll say that I have been waiting to show you this information for a very long time. Though I think some of you can figure that out, I'll actually let the last three comics of Chapter 5 play out before I give my answer... though I think by then the answer will be pretty obvious.

River's Top 5 Greek Myths
1. The adventures of Odysseus
2. The adventures of Perseus
3. Persephone becomes the bride of Hades
4. The winning of the Apple of Discord
5. The Story of Orpheus