My favorite pages from the last three chapters – Places 11 to 20
I finally found some time to look back at the previous chapters - The Last Queen of Gaia, The Door, and The Bipartite Mind - and collect my 20 favorite pages from them. There were exactly 193 pages in the three chapters, so this collection covers around 10% of all published pages. This week, I'll post the pages placed between 11 and 20. Next week, I'll post my personal top 10. The following pages are listed in chronological order.
You can vote for your personal favorite of these 10 pages with the voting widget in the right sidebar!
A diplomatic masterstroke by Viviana. Our reader All-Purpose Guru said it best: San is a deer, and you can see the headlights reflected in its eyes."
I love Lilith's mysterious dialog, especially her Everything is connected. Cause and effect are no longer chronologically linked." in the third panel. I wrote the page after watching the series Dark. But time travel has always been one of my favorite subjects. There are so many excellent movies, series, and games about the topic! My top 5 are:
- Back to the Future
- Groundhog Day
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Steins;Gate
- Dark
But there are so many more that are also great! Day of the Tentacle, Life Is Strange, Predestination, ...
I don't remember ever having seen such a crass rejection when a character insists in coming along with the heroes in other media. It certainly came as as a surprise to many readers. The poses and facial expressions of Malva and Lilith in the first panel are drawn marvelously.
I don't think the 90 switch in the second panel could have been done any better. The poses of the characters are perfectly lifelike. I'm also very fond of the color composition of the page.
I really like the composition of the first panel. The objects in the foreground perfectly frame the action.
Lilith's breakdown looks extremely realistic. I also love the visual effect added to Lilith's AAAARGH" bubble.
It took a while until Powree got all components of the tower right, but in the end we succeeded in showing the entire explanation in a single page. I also like how the colored text boxes turned out. All text boxes in Gaia with such special colors were created by me based on the standard boxes delivered by Powree. There's always a lot of trial and error involved in this. You have to try out all blending modes that Photoshop offers and use the one that works best. But that's often not enough! In many cases, you then have to create a copy of the text box at the same place and give it another blending mode.
My initial idea for this page was that Lilith is lying horizontally between the bottom of the Tower and the surface of the Void. However, she would have to be so small compared to the two massive structures in this case that it would have been very hard to draw this setup in a satisfying manner.
The protection shields look amazing! The lava lake also is nicely colored. I gave Lilith a colored word bubble since a white bubble would have impaired the color compostion.
I'm very proud of Lilith's concise dialog in this scene. I came back to it several times, further improving the wording with each iteration. I also spent quite some time to improve the blending of the hexagon shield around Bhaal.