Added 2 new A* pages:Dang I'm way behind on my usual storms of icon-making. Hmph! As a tide-me-over I took page 91 and split it into two portraits, which are in the episode 10 gallery if you need to find them in the future:
Oh man and I hadn't even thought at first I was gonna get two pages done today because I was up all night reading La Muse; the first page says the online version is just a "preview," but in fact it's all 220 pages of the story, which took some time to get through! Very interesting going, for me primarily because the art by Hugo Petrus is often amazing, looking simultaneously almost photo-referency but also really stylized and with often cartoony exaggerated expressions--but then what's uh extra interesting is that it seems to go through some streamlining processes later on, so for instance some panels just get a little loopy, particularly in the faces, but you also see sorta clever shortcuts being taken, like small background characters no longer having faces drawn on them, but just being sort of blurred. That doesn't sound great but really, some of the art is super, especially near the beginning. Petrus' strong smile lines probably influenced Selenis' face on today's page 96.
The writing is interesting in the same "hm this didn't all work out equally well but some is awesome and the rest is a fascinating attempt" way: the base premise, basically an ultimately powerful, frivolous, well-meaning superwoman out to cure humanity, is patently ridiculous, but that's kind of the point, and it's played for increasing laughs as you wonder how far they can take it, but then tries to get some serious stuff going on, and...well that doesn't work as well, because La Muse (aforesaid superwoman) never takes anything seriously, so you don't believe her when she's finally supposed to be doing that. And then it runs into the old cosmic super-book problem, where they're dealing with poorly defined cosmic powers, and then they have to keep one-upping them, and eventually you get to ridiculous stuff like (actual La Muse quote) "They threw a **** universe at me!" Now if that was still playing for laughs, it would be prime stuff, but it's actually supposed to be kind of serious by that point.
Aaand there's my overly critical review of a vastly superior comic. Yay webcomics! But really go check it out, it's fun.
~~~~~
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that with page 95 today I started adding the subtitles at high-resolution, instead of shrinking the art down, then adding the captions at screen resolution; I had thought that the subtitles would come out sharper if I wasn't doing them big and then shrinking them down before they go up on the web, but in fact they come out way nicer if I do them at high res and then shrink 'em down--the kerning or whatnot is much more precise and stuff, and the letter edges are smoother without being blurry. The little "smbhax.com" in the corner isn't quite as sharp as it was before, but that's just sort of an easygoing watermark, so no biggie. Also this means if I ever have to print them out (in pages after 10:95, I mean), I won't have to reconstruct the darn subtitles and captions! Phew.
|
