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utilitymonstergirlSolipschism is complete! After finishing Palatial, I wanted to make another standalone comic with more plates in the air but preserving a sense of hazy impressionism. I turned to a short-story draft and some notes written about two years prior, which had a compelling hook but a fatal clunkiness. I'd been daydreaming about rebooting it as a comic for a while, with the austere atmosphere and slow-burn pacing it deserved, and eventually decided to just Go For It. (A bunch of dialogue came verbatim from that draft, though the setting’s details have been greatly evolved.)
A lot of inspirations flowed into it, including but not limited to:
“The Borgias” vs. “Borgia: Faith and Fear” - Accuracy in Historical Fiction by Ada Palmer, an excellent essay on the inherent difficulties and tradeoffs of making historical fiction. Any further back than a few decades, absolute accuracy is both impossible and unwatchable in every sense of the word; it's a subjective matter of choosing which details make the story more interesting, and which can be sacrificed for modern comprehensibility.
Some Facts About Doggerland by Daniel Lavery, a poem about the desperate, impossible dream of perfect connection with all of humanity.
The Genesis Quest by Donald Moffitt, a Kilgore Trout-type book where 95% of the value can be gotten from a paragraph summary: alien astronomers pick up a lossy signal with the human genome and a cultural archive. When they find no other trace of humanity, they reconstruct the species in a relationship that’s peaceful but a bit awkward and mutually resented.
Epigraph: This line is sung by Hel, in a gorgeous duet with Baldur - I love its tone of divine immortality as something ominous, underhanded, unfair.
Page 2: More information and more censorship, which itself says a lot about the Hosts. It is very intentional that they either don’t know or don’t care how it comes off to deny a black person their surname and place them in an index of phenotypes.
Page 3: The book title teases the concept of 'humans and related species on very long timescales.' (Also, 'hominidae' is a fun word.) We also see the Hosts overruling him after a token gesture of offering choice.
Page 4: Enter Markus2. "Pending Reconciliation" from page 2 now gains context, and Markus1 isn't shocked or horrified, just exhausted. (I also love overlapping/bleeding panels for moments like this.)
Page 5: No pleasantries from Markus2, just jumping right to a deeply personal question - very different demeanors (at least for now.) The dead Markus looks very well-preserved and not that old, with top-surgery scars that are the second indication of being trans.
Pages 6-10: We pull back from the worldbuilding details for a bit to spend time developing the Markii, with different dispositions and degrees of acclimation to this world.
Page 11: The scheduling plan is quickly shown to be a grim little joke. I had fun coming up with bland, slightly-condescending terms for the itinerary.
Page 12: Markus1 has become more outgoing, deciding not to keep reading and heading out into a room with other residents - this operation is far bigger than just him.
Pages 13-14: I'm proud of that first exchange as a way to both convey that Markus isn't fluent in Arabic and clarify what's being said for audiences who can't read Arabic. (To be clear, I can't either; I copy-pasted this from Wikipedia.)
Healfdane is a bundle of historical gags at once: 'Hwæt' is an Old English word, famously the first word of Beowulf, which can mean approximately 'Behold / Check this out / Listen up / Yo.' His tattoos are based on Ötzi's, a five-thousand-year-old natural mummy found in the Alps and one of the oldest remaining tattooed bodies in the world. Although his name survives today as 'Halfdan,' it shows up in Beowulf*, and also belongs to a Viking who carved it into the Hagia Sophia. He speaks in all-caps because he predates the existence of lowercase letters. He is fascinated by giraffes, which he likely never would have seen in his first life unless he was extremely well-travelled. I made this volley of gags both to see how efficiently I could pack these details, and because the whole point of his presence is to convey that this facility has gathered people from across a long timespan.
*I only now noticed that it's spelled 'Healfdene' in Beowulf, but fuck it, we're centuries before standardized English spelling anyway.
Page 15: I had fun drawing this facility that exists impressionistically, in the same way Aperture Science does - everything comes secondary to conveying a sense of icy vastness. Designing this other resident was also a blast, especially since I resolved ahead of time to not explain anything about them. It was deliberate that they have the same skin tone as Markus, establishing some continuity-of-humanity despite everything else about them.
(Or maybe Markus is a black man non-diegetically drawn in a monochrome palette but this guy is just literally blue.)
Page 16: I like the fake cloud-windows as a recurring symbol to build the suspense of what the hell is outside this place, and had a lot of fun filling a room with them.
Page 17: A neat blend of art and story: drawing an elevator going down was much compositionally easier than drawing it going up, and there's the strangeness of having to descend to an observation deck.
Page 18: Luminance brushes are very fun to play with, as it turns out.
Page 19: Until now, every establishing environmental shot has been in isometric perspective: clean, diagrammatic, and impossible to achieve in reality. Closer-up shots in one- or two-point perspective are straightforward, often centered on a character's face. This is the first zoomed-out shot in full perspective, with three vanishing points, great for conveying vast heights.
Though the specific details of the environment only came together as I drew it, I knew for a while that Side A was going to end with a full-page shot of a vast world that only raises more questions; my goal for the tone was 'analogous to a Bronze Age human seeing Times Square.' I'm happy with how this turned out, especially the verticality and the return of the clouds in an alien context. Although I'm uninterested in providing a specific answer as to what the hell this structure is, I wanted to evoke space stations, Dyson swarms, metropolitan skylines, and general pulp sci-fi cover energy.
A lot of inspirations flowed into it, including but not limited to:
“The Borgias” vs. “Borgia: Faith and Fear” - Accuracy in Historical Fiction by Ada Palmer, an excellent essay on the inherent difficulties and tradeoffs of making historical fiction. Any further back than a few decades, absolute accuracy is both impossible and unwatchable in every sense of the word; it's a subjective matter of choosing which details make the story more interesting, and which can be sacrificed for modern comprehensibility.
Some Facts About Doggerland by Daniel Lavery, a poem about the desperate, impossible dream of perfect connection with all of humanity.
The Genesis Quest by Donald Moffitt, a Kilgore Trout-type book where 95% of the value can be gotten from a paragraph summary: alien astronomers pick up a lossy signal with the human genome and a cultural archive. When they find no other trace of humanity, they reconstruct the species in a relationship that’s peaceful but a bit awkward and mutually resented.
Epigraph: This line is sung by Hel, in a gorgeous duet with Baldur - I love its tone of divine immortality as something ominous, underhanded, unfair.
Page 1: Markus1’s character design owes a lot to Chell from the first Portal - unkempt, bleary, stuck in an endless facility where nothing has made sense or been comfortable for a while. We also get the first bit of the Hosts’ smothering overreach with the fake window. One of my big goals with this project was to carefully pace exposition and dialogue in contexts other than comedy, and I’m happy with how that turned out.
Page 2: More information and more censorship, which itself says a lot about the Hosts. It is very intentional that they either don’t know or don’t care how it comes off to deny a black person their surname and place them in an index of phenotypes.
Page 3: The book title teases the concept of 'humans and related species on very long timescales.' (Also, 'hominidae' is a fun word.) We also see the Hosts overruling him after a token gesture of offering choice.
Page 4: Enter Markus2. "Pending Reconciliation" from page 2 now gains context, and Markus1 isn't shocked or horrified, just exhausted. (I also love overlapping/bleeding panels for moments like this.)
Page 5: No pleasantries from Markus2, just jumping right to a deeply personal question - very different demeanors (at least for now.) The dead Markus looks very well-preserved and not that old, with top-surgery scars that are the second indication of being trans.
Pages 6-10: We pull back from the worldbuilding details for a bit to spend time developing the Markii, with different dispositions and degrees of acclimation to this world.
Page 11: The scheduling plan is quickly shown to be a grim little joke. I had fun coming up with bland, slightly-condescending terms for the itinerary.
Page 12: Markus1 has become more outgoing, deciding not to keep reading and heading out into a room with other residents - this operation is far bigger than just him.
Pages 13-14: I'm proud of that first exchange as a way to both convey that Markus isn't fluent in Arabic and clarify what's being said for audiences who can't read Arabic. (To be clear, I can't either; I copy-pasted this from Wikipedia.)
Healfdane is a bundle of historical gags at once: 'Hwæt' is an Old English word, famously the first word of Beowulf, which can mean approximately 'Behold / Check this out / Listen up / Yo.' His tattoos are based on Ötzi's, a five-thousand-year-old natural mummy found in the Alps and one of the oldest remaining tattooed bodies in the world. Although his name survives today as 'Halfdan,' it shows up in Beowulf*, and also belongs to a Viking who carved it into the Hagia Sophia. He speaks in all-caps because he predates the existence of lowercase letters. He is fascinated by giraffes, which he likely never would have seen in his first life unless he was extremely well-travelled. I made this volley of gags both to see how efficiently I could pack these details, and because the whole point of his presence is to convey that this facility has gathered people from across a long timespan.
*I only now noticed that it's spelled 'Healfdene' in Beowulf, but fuck it, we're centuries before standardized English spelling anyway.
Page 15: I had fun drawing this facility that exists impressionistically, in the same way Aperture Science does - everything comes secondary to conveying a sense of icy vastness. Designing this other resident was also a blast, especially since I resolved ahead of time to not explain anything about them. It was deliberate that they have the same skin tone as Markus, establishing some continuity-of-humanity despite everything else about them.
(Or maybe Markus is a black man non-diegetically drawn in a monochrome palette but this guy is just literally blue.)
Page 16: I like the fake cloud-windows as a recurring symbol to build the suspense of what the hell is outside this place, and had a lot of fun filling a room with them.
Page 17: A neat blend of art and story: drawing an elevator going down was much compositionally easier than drawing it going up, and there's the strangeness of having to descend to an observation deck.
Page 18: Luminance brushes are very fun to play with, as it turns out.
Page 19: Until now, every establishing environmental shot has been in isometric perspective: clean, diagrammatic, and impossible to achieve in reality. Closer-up shots in one- or two-point perspective are straightforward, often centered on a character's face. This is the first zoomed-out shot in full perspective, with three vanishing points, great for conveying vast heights.
Though the specific details of the environment only came together as I drew it, I knew for a while that Side A was going to end with a full-page shot of a vast world that only raises more questions; my goal for the tone was 'analogous to a Bronze Age human seeing Times Square.' I'm happy with how this turned out, especially the verticality and the return of the clouds in an alien context. Although I'm uninterested in providing a specific answer as to what the hell this structure is, I wanted to evoke space stations, Dyson swarms, metropolitan skylines, and general pulp sci-fi cover energy.
Fantastic Overview
Date: 2023-11-26 06:47 pm (UTC)to tack on to Page 15 from discord, UM-G had said:
- Option A: they have the same skin tone as Markus, establishing some continuity-of-humanity despite everything else about them
- Option B: Markus is a black man non-diegetically drawn in a monochrome palette but this guy is just literally blue
And here I tack on my discord response when I woke up that day to read the backlogCustodial Overseer Unit, or Cou (like a pigeon's cooing, like fawning over an infant), in-place by those that the facility is in the stead of, to care for all the humans.
This was the result of having read Floornight (thanks to UMG's own cover fanart way-back-when) and as a result already having been primed for "spinning off neurotypes of yourself from alternate timelines" with that work, and seeing the page from the lens of Side B of Solipschism.
It's neat the way we can look back, and once again Page 15 is Just Fun because of the caretaker