The people have spoken: WIP and noodz it is

The people have spoken!

And who am I, but your humble host? Am I greater than the people? Is my flesh able to withstand the mighty and awesome cry of a community united into one voice, shouting "give us boobies sometimes!" 

No, it is not. I am just a man. You are a REVOLUTION.

Yes, the poll is over, and The People, those who exercised their sacred franchise, have been heard.

They said:

1. Show us more WIP
2. Show us neat drawings, sometimes with boobies

And so in this inaugural issue of the NEWsletter, I'll endeavor to honor the will of the people and to commit myself to serve proudly at your pleasure.

Without further ado, here's a little bit of everything you can come to expect in the coming months.

Walk with me.

The next episode of Ronin Digital Express is titled "Gaiden."

It's a little bit different than the episodes that came before, in that it takes a break from the Western genre and has more of a post-apocalyptic/sci-fi vibe.

In it, the Ronin finds himself exploring pre-Cataclysm ruins (megacities in our future/their past that haven't been occupied for hundreds of years). 

Previous episodes have revealed that the Ronin works as a "bitcourier," meaning he carries packages (or "claims") of valuable old-world data from city to city delivering them to "gaijins," digital archivists responsible for reconstructing the world's past and culture from the information they are able to recover.

The Ronin mainly freelances for a gaijin named Odin Watanabe, who you'll meet in "Gaiden." Watanabe owns Ronin Digital, and the armored van he occasionally works out of is called, you guessed it, the "Ronin Digital Express."

"Gaiden" breaks not only from genre, but also format. I'm going to start carving longer chapters into shorter weekly episodes, finding natural cliffhangers and act breaks to give it a more serialized feel. As an added bonus, it'll mean a more regular publishing schedule when we return in the fall.

My big chore with "Gaiden" was to get a lot more comfortable with locations and perspectives. Here's the opening page:

Right there you can see we start with a dramatic 3-point perspective. I was extremely intimidated by this, but now that I've done it a handful of times, I have to admit it might be my favorite perspective to work in.

I don't know why my brain was broken about it before. I was thinking about it as a more dramatic 2-point, but a webinar I was watching said the main difference is that a 3-point has no horizon line.

I don't know why, but that little thought completely opened it up to me.

And here's a classic 2-point for the city that we're exploring in this chapter. 

The 2-point seems most useful if you're looking straight at something that's on a corner, and you need to get an overall "flat" view of it in its entirety. You can do that with 1-point too, but 2-point seems to give an environment more of a "3D" feel.

Here's a real-world example. If you stop to look at something on the street, you're probably not seeing it in 1-point, unless you move into a 1-point position on purpose. You'd have to line up your eyes just right to see 1-point. For example, you'd have to stop someplace odd, like right in the middle of a crosswalk, and look down the street to get a perfect 1-point.

Now, if you stop at random and just look at a building, you're most likely encountering it in 2-point. 

1-point has dramatic uses, but if you use it for all of your environments and there's no clear stylistic reason for it, it can look a little stiff and lazy.

You'll note the massive wall around the perimeter and the window-less look of the standing skyscrapers.

The idea is that these are climate change mitigation structures. One of the reasons these cities are still standing, mostly intact, after hundreds of years is that they're built to withstand immense environmental pressure.

Is that realistic? Fuck if I know, I'm a comic book artist. 

Speaking of using 1-point for dramatic purposes, here's the introductory "hero shot" of the Ronin in a brand new outfit; one built for action.

I designed this a long time ago and decided then that it'd be an "occasional treat" to see him in it. It's not quite the symbiote Spider-Man, but it does have an air of "cool" to it that I think you don't want to abuse with overuse.

Anyway, the big challenge for me here was SCALE.

You can actually fudge scale quite a bit if you know what you're doing. Since I don't, my first pass at this resulted in the Ronin being 60 feet tall:

Now that I'm looking at it with fresh eyes, it does kinda work.

BUT, I really wanted to convey the size of the city around him.

Over-sizing the Ronin gives you a better look at him and makes him seem more heroic, sure. 

Alternatively, making him too small would not be a great hero shot. It'd make him seem diminutive, or afraid.

So I split the difference, and hope it gives the impression that while the ruin is enormous, he's suited for the task at hand. 

In the world of Ronin Digital Express, most people stay out of the ruins. They think that they're haunted, or bad luck.

We're not looking at a society with advanced scientific understanding. They're rebuilding after an apocalypse. So, most folks have that Old West superstitious quality about them again.

Now, there's nothing explicitly supernatural at play in the world Ronin Digital Express. But there are a lot of dangerous pre-Cataclysm nasties lurking around.

To wit, the conflict in "Gaiden" is between the Ronin and a couple of pre-Cataclysm crowd control robots. They're covered in barnacles and have been roaming the city for hundreds of years looking for a threat. 

Like I mentioned, this chapter is definitely more of a "hack and slash" actioner than a Western, and much more anime/manga-inspired.

But we'll get to studying the action scenes in the next issue of the newsletter. 
 

Now, here's your boobies.

Not sure why, but I felt compelled to draw Ginger and Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island, and shared that on reddit here. I then further had a notion to do an NSFW version.

I've been thinking about launching a Patreon, and doing a "spicy" tier. I like drawing nudes/pinups/cheesecake here and there, but felt that had fallen out of fashion.

Lately, though, I've been seeing more and more artists doing it again, so maybe it's coming back around?

I don't know, what do you think? A good chunk of you perverts said you wanted it in the Twitter poll, so let me know if this was what you were thinking/want to see more of.
 

That's all for now. 

Thank you for your support. It really means a lot.

If it's not too much trouble, share Ronin Digital Express with a friend, or even an enemy with good taste. 

Be good.

*rent