TELO’S JOURNAL

Wouldn’t you be certain? Wouldn’t you suppose that anything THAT old must have some good information on it? How could it not? I mean, look at it this way; even if it contained nothing more than a list of some old Quin’s favorite recipes — then, well — it tells us SOMETHING. If the only things worth knowing are so mundane and provincial, then maybe the answers are too complex for folks like us to discover this easily. Does that settle it? No. But at least Grim and I can keep on looking. And when we eventually do find something more satisfying we can return to The Valley knowing just how valuable such information can be.

TRANSCRIPT

[Leaping without considering, Telo inches closer and closer to the old memory chip artifact that they've discovered deep in the tangles of the wild. Certain that it is nothing more than an old chip lost in the ruins of some very old abandoned colony -- albeit a chip with some so-called ancient wisdom encoded upon it -- Telo explains his hopes for the object as we watch him extend his arm as if to retrieve it. ]

TELO: This is it! This is what we’ve been looking for.

TELO: I only need to reach out and pick it up. An old memory chip like this might contain ANYTHING. Maps. Secrets. Keys to the wisdom of the ancients…

TELO: Answers.

8R4D’s Journal

Can you guess that I did a bit of site redesign right around the same time I designed this panel? (Yes, I’m about a two weeks ahead of myself here.) Good. It’s a little obvious, but that’s okay. Now, stop looking at the art and think about the story. We’ve reached the half-way point into our so-called “origin tale” with the publication of this panel, and you may be able to figure a few things out. A rag-tag crew of adventure seekers go off looking for existential redemption and are offered it in the form of an artifact in the wilderness. Have you thought about the implications of such a text-book storyline? No. Well, I have. And don’t worry. Things are gonna get even more convoluted.

This is Part 6 of 12 of Chapter One | Originally Posted 2010-04-17


Comments and Discussion

(2 Comments So Far...)

Shirley Salomons

Interesting. How long does it take to draw one part of the cartoon?

Link | Posted by: Shirley Salomons | April 18th, 2010 at 8:50 pm   

8r4d

(This would be the obligatory mom explanation…)

Depends on how much I can recycle from past strips. None of this is hand-drawn, unless you call tweaking the edges of shapes and adjusting fill colours with a mouse hand-drawing. Everything is done as a vector-image, which essentially means that each part of each “model” is a collection of dozens or even a hundred or more shapes manipulated in a piece of software. All those shapes are bent, warped, shifted, rotated, and then linked together to form what amounts to a character puppet (or maybe just a bit of scenery) that can be moved and posed to fill a certain need. Making the original models takes lots of time: the Telo model, given that I’ve created about 30 different hands, 20 different expressions, and six different angles for his body, has taken close to twenty hours of work… but then I don’t need to repeat that for every strip. I can pose him in about twenty minutes and put him into a new strip later on. But that said, every time you see something new, I’ve had to draw a model for it and make sure all the proportions match, etc, etc.

I’m not doing it to be lazy, though. It lets me try new ideas, create a richer world, publish a new strip each week, and still have time to raise your granddaughter…

Link | Posted by: 8r4d | April 23rd, 2010 at 9:27 am   

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