Hello! I hope you are doing great. I’m finally getting back on track after some schedule problems around the turn of the year, and a detour on the comic progress. Apologies for the lack of activity around here in the last weeks. I need to remember making a planned pause around those days.
Regarding the comic I’m working on, I made a bit of a style reset, since I realized how important was the environment for this particular story. In the lookout for specific backgrounds for the sequence (that happens in some kind of VR memorial space) I decided to give it a more dedicated look, and resorted to some modernist building complexes that still exist in my city, as reference. I think I was watching an episode of Chainsaw Man when it hit me that I wanted the memorial to be in the type of building where I spent a lot of time in during my childhood. Even though the apartment building in the anime was not at all what I had in mind, it had a certain feeling to it that pushed me in that direction. And then, I thought about that brilliant city walk sequence in Andor.
Star Wars has an interesting range of locations, that seems to get richer when they try something different. If you have seen the show, you know they went for uncharted territory in more than one aspect this time, and one of those was using brutalist and modernist styles of architecture for some of the city backgrounds. A feature in some modernist building complexes (like the ones they built in Santiago in the 70s), is that they gave special attention to the act of walking among the buildings, with communicating pathways such as pavement thin trails, sometimes among gardens, and even high tunnels connecting two different apartment blocks. There was a specific philosophy behind this, suggesting paths of transit to communicate groups of people. I had friends who lived in these blocks, and, as kids, we made use of all the weird features of the constructions, the connecting walkways and passages, the concrete boxes for huge gas cylinders, and the dense patches of vegetation growing between the geometric shapes. It was the terrain of the games we came up with, and the things we imagined.
The space in the comic is not as lively as my memories, (also, because as it will be revealed later in the text, it’s a hacked and decaying digital environment) but I wanted it to have some of the feeling of these weird blocks. This is what I take from that classic advice “write what you know”. Not necessarily telling stories about fields in one’s own experience, but trying to bring some air, or feeling that belongs to personal memories, even, as in this case, for some passing details in the establishing shots of a short story.
I’ll try to share regular progress updates for this story, as I did with the previous one. Thanks a lot for your patience!
Juan.
