You can watch the same intro we did if you want to, and you should. If I suggested that Final Fantasy XV had a wild tone - Monster Hunter Road Trip + heartthrob warlocks - the austerity and documentary presentation here will twist your head a few degrees past its stated tolerances. Some have found it confusing! As usual, I stand ready to part the veil.
Today’s Sketchdump is an interesting one I think. Last week my youngest son came down with a cold and he was having a hard time sleeping. I laid down in his bed and read some stories to him and then he asked me to make one up. I started with the classic Dad play of using your kid in the story. “Once upon a time there was a little boy named Noah.” I ended up telling a story about a little boy who lived in a lighthouse on a tiny island in the middle of a great big ocean. One foggy day he saw a ship on the horizon and realized his light was turned off. So he had to run up the stairs all the way to the top of the lighthouse to turn the light back on. He kept getting distracted though as it turns out his light house is full of rooms. They started out pretty normal, he stopped at the kitchen first and got himself a sandwich, then the bedroom and the laundry room and he had to stop in each room and do something. There was a video game room where he stopped to play Mario, and a homework room (which he actually skipped right over since he was obviously in such a big hurry) and they got more ridiculous as he climbed. The last room before the top was an “Ice Cream” room which I honestly have never seen in a lighthouse, but it was a crowd pleaser. Anyway, he finally got to the top and turned on the light just in time for the pirate ship to see it and avoid crashing into his little island. It was a goofy story I cooked up on the spot, but then he asked to hear it again the next night.
I was feeling a little nostalgic today. Usually I never go back in the archive but today I kept jumping back and forth between the current comic and the first one. Like this:
It’s been a long time since we talked about Club PA but it’s still going strong. I first of all want to thank everyone who signed up when we first launched it last year. If you signed up previously it might be about time to renew and if you don’t have any idea what Club PA is, let me break it down for you.
We had a really good time checking out both games, actually, but yeah. As soon as the bing bong told us it was downloaded, this is what was up. It's been a long time since I invested myself in the larger budget "Square Games," we've been in different places for awhile now, with my tastes more or less chipped into granite and them trying to broaden scope. But go to a friend's house and check out that FFXV shit, for reals. It's a road movie where everybody is some species of sorcerer. The tone is fucking whacked out.
This is the strip we did on stage at PAX East. Typically its manufacture runs virtually the length of the time allotted, but with all the extracurricular sketching he's doing it was like forty minutes or something. The cold was real, though: I had to bring someone a pass, outside, and only a few seconds out there triggered a fight or flight response. I felt the surface of my eyes freeze.
As someone outside all the traditional production-y roles for visual stuff, I find this kind of thing really interesting. Steve Hamaker, who did all the coloring on The Judging Wood and a bunch of other rad stuff, all over the place, everywhere, recorded himself coloring the last page and it's pretty fuckin' wild. My son winced when I typed the f-word there, but I assured him that this is how the truly hardcore comport themselves.
I’m still on my post PAX vacation but I wanted to post a few sketches since it’s Monday. First though I wanted to say I hope you enjoyed the Trill comics. I know our stuff can be a little hard to follow sometimes. We don’t like to start at the “beginning” of stories and we rarely stop at the”end”. I can’t speak for Tycho but I know for my part I like to leave room for people to interpret their own stories. What we do is intentionally loose and I know that’s not for everyone. I really love Trill and her birds and drawing her was so much fun especially in this last page. I guarantee she will be back again at some point. For now though we will be returning to your regularly scheduled PA strips.
The Judging Wood is only five parts - well, this side of the equation is, anyhow - and here is Part Four. I had to "know" a lot of things to work on the book, and some of that stuff is in this stuff.
I usually try and pick up a new game or two at PAX and I grabbed some good ones at East.
Part Three of The Judging Wood is now available, with a lush cameo prowling over from the other Daughters project, "The Tithe." We are the luckiest fans of this setting, I think.
We just wrapped up another PAX and I celebrated by sleeping until almost noon. I always have a great time at these shows but this one in particular was great. This year's Acquisitions Inc. will go down as one of my favorites. We had a few thousand people watching live in the audience and then another 15 thousand folks watching at home via Twitch. I cannot believe this is my job!
Part Two of The Judging Wood is now available for your perusal. One of the interesting things about having worked with Steve Hamaker as opposed to handling the colors in-house like normal is that his choices would not have been our choices. If we pull somebody in, though, we actually want to collaborate with them; it's not a straight up work for hire thing. I'm fairly certain the Owl here wouldn't have had dark feathers - I believe Grib was thinking of a snowy owl - and blonde hair with wildflower streaks weren't in the cards, either. We tend to use a more grim palette in general. This is a cool way to think of the Eyrewood.
It can be found right at this link! There'll be stuff there all weekend basically - including Sunday's Acquisitions Incorporated adventure, live at 1:30 Eastern Time - so give it a whirl.
Tycho mentions being inspired by a doodle in my sketchbook. This is the one he's talking about.