Here's The Full Artwork I Did For The Upcoming Avatar Concert! Thank You For Having Me🎶

why must you draw something like this that draws me into this tumblr crap?

I had too many comparison messages/requests to abstain from this crossover any longer

Hello Ashley! Returned to an old story of mine and trying to rebuild large parts of the plot that didn't satisfy me. I figure it's best to detail all the major story beats before I fill in all the icing around them. From chapter 1 to chapter 15 (so we're not considering spoilers!), what major story beats would you say you finalized first? Was it hard deciding which little bits needed to come up and when, even after you had scripted the major steps?

–You’re definitely on the right track, I also used that method. I had a beginning and an end point for the first book, then looked backwards from there, mapping the major beats in each chapter. It’s also personally important for me to know the WHY of everything. I need a Why for everything I write and do, I find it motivating.

So it’s been a while and my memory is foggy, but I believe the broad outline was like:> Duane & Sette have misadventures that help them understand each other. Why do they need to understand each other? Because they are lonely, broken people and the goal is to better them.> They make it to her cousin’s along with the macguffin, which results in a climax, but macguffin escapes. What is the why of the macguffin? The macguffin isn’t just an antagonist; it’s all antagonism. It is the ultimate macguffin, and is motivated by the misery and misdeeds in the story itself.> They chase the macguffin and wind up isolated in a situation that forces out the best of Sette and the worst of Duane, with disastrous consequences. Why is the worst of Duane important to see? Because if there’s hope for the worst of us, despair is only an excuse. Why is the best of Sette important to see? Because it’s not so very Best, and she needs to see all the room she has to get better.> They reunite with the macguffin for another battle.

Easy-peasy. But now let’s flesh out that first step and mark out the milestones:

engage and fight the wand’ring root, introducing their respective characters in very broad strokes

encounter the RBB, enter the crypt, still in-character, but each gradually starts to crack. Duane goes super violent, Sette shows fear

fight each other at the waystation, Duane’s veneer of civility is fully shattered by admitting he’s a closet cannibal with control issues, Sette’s veneer of roguishness is shattered by admitting she’s scared of failing her da

True selves semi-revealed, Sette has an adventure in town, starts trouble, leads to…

Duane battling Quigley, coming face to face with Alderode

Sette sneaks Duane over the border, enters his memories

By seeing who Duane truly was, Sette fully understands who he is now

During their fight the next day in the toyshop, Duane fully understands what Sette needs of him (he doesn’t fully understand who she is, he’s not as insightful as she is)

And bam, that’s how I outline. It’s a pretty simple structure when you lay it out like that, but then you start adding in B and C plots, two dozen secondary characters, and it becomes deceptively complex!

Otherwise yeah, figuring out where to move the plot forward, where to cut away to other storylines (and how much to devote to them), where to pause and meander for character building - that’s all the most difficult stuff. Most of us can sit around and write cute dialog or character studies all day - fanfiction is FULL of amateur writers who can do this marvellously - but the BEST and most successful writers are able to tell an engaging narrative with lots of moving parts and suspenseful story turns. Maybe they get panned because their prose isn’t elegant or maybe their characters are hackneyed - but they still sell mountains of books because they know how to keep readers turning pages by structuring a suspenseful story.

Good luck with that, ‘cause it’s the hardest part! And personally, I have particular considerations I have to make that you probably don’t have to in prose, particularly prose meant to be read all at once. I need to try and make each page at least mildly engaging and end on a hook wherever I can, since there’s no guarantee the reader is going to come back to progress the story in two days :D

Ghost Trick

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

How do you feel about the fact that Book 1 of Unsounded written in prose would be like one or maybe two books/volumes and take much less time? I often think about stuff like that as a comic artist :o

It’s true, but it would be a different beast. Stories are so dependent on the medium. Think about how they change between books and film, between film and tv, between comics and novels! Watchmen the comic and Watchmen the film are related, but they’re third cousins at best. Are the ATLA comics really a seamless transition from the show? Does FFVII the OG game really feel like it came before Advent Children? I am sorry I only have Boomer examples

Unsounded in prose would lose all the sight gags; the moments of surprise or awe when you load a new page to see a new creature or location or sudden story turn. Reactions that are told with a heart-wrenching facial expression would instead have to be limned in words.

And words are great, words are super powerful, but words do their own thing and have their own strengths. You can paint scenes far more powerfully with words than you can with comic art, because with them, you’re painting on the infinite canvas of the reader’s imagination. But at the same time, you’re losing specificity and some potential impact. Well-done art affects us deeply. We’re drawn to it. We want to see faces.

Anyway, this has actually really been on my mind the last few nights because I’ve been listening to The Neverending Story, which I’d never read before, but I’ve always really enjoyed the movie. And though the plots are basically the same, they are SO different to me! I dislike Bastian so much in the book, and like Atreyu so much more. It was totally opposite for me in the movie. And it’s all to do with the actors.

So I don’t know, Anon, it doesn’t bug me that yes, the plot of the Unsounded could be told faster in prose, in books. Because a work is more than its plot. Webcomics in particular are this crazy modern format that let us communicate like this in-between every page. We have memes and in-jokes and can speculate on mysteries and dream and hope about upcoming pages. It’s cool!

Novels can do this too, of course, and serial fiction has been a thing for centuries. Webcomics are a pretty neat evolution of that.

Anyway, I forgot my point.

Cool, thanks for answering! ^.^

Two things: 1) what exactly is the Foi-Hellick affair? I know it was an Aldish civil insurrection of some kind but I am interested in the details the details and 2) (if this is not too spoilery) What exactly was Queen Sonorie's agenda in having Duane killed? I never fully understood that. P.S. Love your comic so much it has taken over my life

Haha, don’t let it take over your life, there are better things out there like coffee and foot rubs.

You ask about intentional mysteries! Well, the Foi-Hellick affair isn’t too mysterious, it just hasn’t been discussed in the comic yet. The Foi-Hellick affair/war/insurrection/rebellion/call-it-what-you-will was indeed a civil insurrection. It concerned an attempt by two wealthy families recently joined by marriage (the Foi-Hellicks) in the Aldish district of Avelpit to declare their independence from the Aldish state and become a holding of Cresce. Queen Sonorie reneged on her promise of military aid after the mastermind of the affair, Roger Foi-Hellick, absconded to the Crescian court, abandoning his family and his cause. The Foi-Hellicks tried to go Just Kidding Bro but it didn’t work out so well for them. When it became clear they were going to be made an example of, they recruited a citizen army and hired southern mercenaries, kickstarting a pretty brutal few years of warfare that they ultimately lost. Badly. Impaled-on-spears-in-front-of-their-own-children badly.

Duane and his brother served in the army during this. We’ll see some of it firsthand in an upcoming chapter and meet many of the players. This was a very important event, which is why I threw in some early references to it.

As for why Queen Sonorie had Duane killed, you can believe Duane’s speculation here, or not. Duane thinks Sonorie wanted to encourage the ill feelings between Alderode’s two religions by making it look like she supports the Gefendur. The idea that Sonorie would kill a Ssaelit priest for them would have to positively infuriate Duane’s camp, no? If Alderode falls to all-out religious civil war, that can only be good for Cresce. “Divide and conquer,” suggests the zombie.

But this is only Duane’s speculation, and all he has to go on are words written on a wall in his own shed blood.

*whispers* every time you respond to an ask here I feel so special~~~

Care to share any lore pertaining to the carvings on the wall in the inner temple, or would that be too spoilery?

We’re going to get much more into the two-toes in chapter 12. There’s an old lady lizard who will expand upon her culture much more colourfully than I can here :)

AIMEE WAI

Kelp Forest by divindk

This Town is Haunted👻👻