Redbox w/ Commentary, Page 4

   Absolutely gorgeous. It encapsulates the mood of the running- nay, dashing- through the snow, here, and the mood of the entire comic. Lagging behind, turning back to look at the moon, which is shedding its blue light over the panel. Haunting. Absolutely haunting. Out of all the panels in Redbox, this is one of the ones of which I'm the most proud. I hope you can see why.

Redbox w/ Commentary, Page 3

   Now would be a good time to point out the stylistic decisions I made in telling this story. A lot of this commentary is going to be me just pointing out a lot of the symbolism as if it were deliberate on my part rather than a happy accident, but these choices I'm going to point out here were deliberate. The lack of panel borders, for instance. It fits very well the mood of the original dream and the theme of the comic, reflecting this endless timelessness, of time flowing out into infinite space. The first panel has a border here, which, happy accident like I just said, is about looking at a watch, where the time is contained instead of limitless.

   And the black and white. The only color in Redbox is cast directly by light sources, and in the first panel of this one you can see me playing that up. A lot of shadows, and maybe I should have done more elsewhere, to place a greater emphasis on the black and white, which in turn places more emphasis on the color. But, now I've told you to notice it, so notice it.

The ice cream bars and cold french fries were very much a part of my dream. Everything here is accurate to that, right down to the not-quite-Golden-Arches on the thing of fries.

Redbox w/ Commentary, Page 2

   I think the fogginess here is pretty well captured. It's hard to draw things like fog, but I think I did it alright. Certainly better here than on page one, but, those silhouettes coming out of the fog with the glowing cigar tips in their mouths was pretty important. It's just (quite obviously) a very dreamlike and surreal setting, establishing a tone, not in itself for the entire comic itself, but it sets a tone that such a tone can even exist within the world of this comic. Timelessness.

   After Jackson and Edward, we are introduced to Meghan and a character who in the dream was me, so it's basically me in the comic, too. I suppose.

Redbox w/ Commentary, Page 1

   Scene up. We see little lights, red light coming out of the fog and darkness. The lights resolve themselves to be the flaming ends of lit cigars, being smoked by a pair of joggers. It may seem kind of odd for joggers to be smoking at the same time, but it is very very cold and right now they're celebrating living.

   These first pages were adapted very faithfully from the original dream. The characters here are designed to look like Robert Pattinson and Jackson Rathbone, because that's who they were in my dream. That's why these two characters are named Jackson and Edward. Oh, by the way: meet Jackson and Edward. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff from the dream and otherwise that isn't really brought up in the comic, but you'll see it here in the commentary.

Redbox w/ Commentary, Cover Page

   The cover page for Redbox here was originally drawn to be a page within, where the main character (basically, me, in the dream,) travels to Africa. I realized that I didn't know how to draw a Jeep from a slightly high angle (or, really, anything but from the side and back,) so I scrapped it and drew the panel you see in the comic, which depicts the Jeep from precisely those angles. There's actually quite a few efforts I went through before that panel, figuring out how to go at it. Vehicles are hard to draw, man. Also, mud huts, and roads.

   The perspective changes somewhere in there, so I had to fudge a lot of stuff. When it came time to make a cover (not a strict necessity for a 24 hour comic, but a tradition nonetheless,) I rediscovered this, fudged a bit more to the best of my ability, and designed a spiffy title logo for Redbox. Boom, now it's a cover.

 All in all, the cover page here fits the Redbox mood well. "Take Me Home, Country Roads" plays in my head just thinking about it. Except maybe as sung by Japanese schoolchildren, like in that one Studio Ghibli film. Just the entire mood of that sequence, there, on this cover.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 24

   I guess that the last note to leave on, this blank page, opens up an opportunity to explain how this round of 24-hour comics went. Much like the requirement to use "sickgnarly" as a sound effect in our first 24 hour comic, we had set up the arbitrary limitation of only one splash panel. Maybe that's why we weren't very successful this go-round. A little splash panel goes a long way.

   In Cailin's, I think it was going to be the act of brutal violence of Sweeps bashing in her stepfather's brains with a frying pan. That's why she called her character Sweeps: after sweeps week, where things get a little insane in order to draw in some ratings.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 23

   In comic book time, talking is a free action. This can sometimes get a little ridiculous, as seen here. There's a wall of text spoken while a character is dangling for his life there. That is quite the speech bubble. And, yeah, that was deliberate.

   Texas Ranger looks like Josh Holloway here. First season of LOST, shooting at that polar bear. He bursts in, because it was his gun pointing at Peckinwood's face in that last panel. What's that gun? The reveal: it was Texas Ranger. Another reveal: Peckinwood's a bad guy. Not that there are any good guys in this comic, but Peckinwood's a real pervert, and kind of a jerk.

   It's weird, here: Rawhide's left hand looks like a hoof but his right one looks like a hand. The perspective on that platform is a bit forced, as I had to fudge the trapdoor after the rope was going in front of it. Check this: Rawhide is standing in front of the trapdoor, with his knife behind the rope. Yeah.

   We're left hanging, which I assure you did not realize at first was a pun until now but am using it here as I did. Where to go from this? I had a few ideas of what to do with all that rope, but none of them were strictly appropriate.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 22

   And now, onto panel layout. This is a busy, busy page. I suppose that the bottom half didn't have to be so cramped, as it makes all the twists in that moment confusing. There's a lot of double-crosses there, and it's all crammed into the bottom half. I should have planned that better.

   A few profile views, a few views slightly looking down. Not much opportunity to get all cinematic in your angles when dealing with a gallows right there: in order to keep up continuity of space, you have to incorporate that somehow. So it's incredibly claustrophobic.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 21

   Believe it or not, the shot of LeCastor here saying that he doesn't fear death is his own hero shot. I mean, it's not bad, if you look at it. There's just that stray hair there, and you're just distracted by the horribleness of the panel following. I don't know what LeCastor means by that, as I guess it was one of those things I never got the opportunity to get around to. There's not many religious themes in this. Besides the cross around Rawhide's neck. He is I think a Spanish Catholic.

   There's a lot of twists and turns and reveals on the bottom half of the page: Rawhide shows up to save LeCastor, but the hangman is the sheriff, and he himself is held gunpoint by what transpires on page 23 to be the Texas Ranger. I guess the entire thing was a gambit by him all along to get Rawhide out of hiding, a la the Sheriff of Nottingham hanging Friar Tuck so that Prince John can get at Robin Hood in Robin Hood. Like, well, it worked.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 20

   Here' where the entire thing becomes worth it. Focusing on the panel layouts gives me perfect opportunity to draw your attention to the panel borders on the "bathing" scene. The edges at the bottom ripple, in a widening circle from Rawhide, as if the panel itself were bifurcating the water. It's actually a pretty convincing illusion. Pretty clever, eh?

   I really can't put into words much else of the panel bordering on this page. The edges of some of these panels are doubled over, as if it weren't trippy enough. And exactly which borders become incorporated into the drawings and vice versa just defies logic. Look at that establishing shot there for an example. The first panel, except it's reversed. I suppose you could treat these page backs as manga, read them that way I mean. Okay, the first panel.

   Half of the river flows out of the panel, half is cut off by the edge, the moon is also open, the bank and background with the trees there... When Rawhide dips his hoof-foot toe into the river to test the temperature, his leg doesn't open up into the edge of the panel, but the border lines of his foot do open up into the water in the middle of the panel. Where Rawhide looks over his shoulder, the arm facing us is closed off, but the rest of him is open. The rim of Jeff Bridges's hat forms a panel border in spite of being a line of normal thickness and not a border thick line. In fact, the only panel with normal edges on this page is the last one, the one with the needle record scratch and, "Dad?" As if the comic weren't weird enough, up and along comes this. Let's just acknowledge that this is a very, very trippy page, and move on.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 19

   And here we get to see Rawhide, naked. It's like, the wet sari scene or something. Bollywood. Look, look at his little half-cow tail! This nudity is much less uncomfortable than I remember drawing it. You practically get to see half a bum here, but, I don't know, it's half cow, so it's far removed from inappropriate and actually somewhat wholesome. Anthropomorphizing animals tends to do that somehow. It's like a fourth of a bum, then.

   And it's A PHOTO REFERENCED JEFF BRIDGES, which I literally just traced off the screen of Cailin's laptop. Rawhide's father. This page sports some really good artwork aside from that, but this photorealism here stands out. I guess he's here to tell his son that they're hanging LeCastor. I mean, that' what's implied by this scene, and that's what I meant this scene to convey, but the way it reads it's just random events. So I'm telling you now, at least. I'm telling you that Rawhide's father told him that LeCastor was going to get hanged for thievery.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 18

   Aand any artistic credibility I may or may not have gained through earlier artwork is thrown out the window with the artwork of the arms of Shia LaBeouf's character here. No, I don't know. I don't know what's up with that. I tried disguising it with the borders, but that only served to draw attention to it.

   Also bleeding through besides the panels, the red marker used to ink out the red of the sign: COW GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. That's probably one of the cleverest gags in the comic, and Cailin agrees, but we had to cut off the top of that, make it less legible to make it more family-friendly. I guess. Either way, not showing the full thing was deliberate. I'm pretty sure to make it more family-friendly. That AD ON at the sign on the door being cut off at the edge of the panel there? ADULTS ONLY, of course.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 17

   We are continuing our introduction to Shia LaBeouf's character, stepping out on a cow brothel (it's not explicitly stated in the comic, but yeah, that's what that is), which is full of cows in various stages of anthropomorphization. (Rawhide himself is the offspring of onesuch cow hooker and a photorealistic drawing of Jeff Bridges.) I drew that drawing of all the cow whores as an exploration of what the Rawhide Vindaloo universe would entail (yes, it was purely for research purposes, I swear!) and I cut and pasted it in there.

   There's a stagecoach being pulled by humans in the background of the last panel here. This, just like the train in the background on page nine, represents a vehicle in the background that had to be added later. There, it was because westerns need trains, and here, it's because westerns need stage coaches. I had forgotten both of those very essential things in the first draft going through, so I had to add where I could. This panel was simply the only space I had to fit such an item, which was kind of necessary because a stagecoach being pulled by non-sentient (feral?) humans illustrates the idiosyncrasies of this universe.

   Fun fact, too. Not only was that panel the only place to put that, it was the only place to put that: page 17 and page 9 are the only pages in which color appears, in both brown (in the vehicle, on both pages) and red (here, in the sign above Shia LaBeouf's character's head; on page 9, in the headshot of course.)

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 16

   There's a lot to say about the panel layouts on this page, because it's by far the cleverest on this page. The crowd incorporated into the borders of the first row of panels, placing emphasis on the dance moves the crowd's doing. Then, the next row of panels, which are literally BANDIT. (!). The Texas Ranger is introduced at the edge of all this bustle, emphasized a solitary man. And then, from his angle, it's LeCastor who's at the edge of the panel, on the opposite side this time.

   Emphasized here, in an unusual and generally unique example of entirely within-the-border border, is LeCastor's tail, which you probably missed the first time like I said because this is the first time it's being emphasized. See how much emphasis there is? That's kind of the point of looking at the backs of these and the panel layouts, emphasizing the emphasis.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 15

   IT'S! THE! HALF! COW!

   BANDIT!

   That's, like, a trampoline or something that LeCastor's on. I really don't know. Yeah, probably bursting into song about how rad crime is, in public, right after committing a crime, is probably not the best idea. Should have stayed inside, buddy. I guess this is a sort of commentary on how public musical numbers in musicals often lead to situations that wouldn't happen in real life. (Well, yeah.)

   And we are introduced to a figure, standing on the outskirts of the musical number. It's Shia LaBeouf's character, TEXAS RANGER! That hero shot of him looks very like a Shia, so, I  figured, that's who got "cast." He is smoking a cigarette, and the smoke thereof becomes a though bubble (I guess? I'm not sure I planned that) and he recognizes LeCastor's tail. That's what that is. Hey, a beaver tail? Just like the beaver tail of that beaver-tailed guy who robbed that bank a few pages back! He totally had a beaver tail. (I am emphasizing this here because this is the first time LeCastor's... well, Castor(beaver)-ness is even brought up. His name isn't even mentioned till page 23, you know.)

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 14

   FANTASTIC! Through this page you can see the outline of LeCastor in the panel border, with the top highlighting his comb-over, the bottom border going across and the side border tracing out his fingers. That is one well drawn hand, there. I'm proud of that hand. That's a really nice hand, with some really nice foreshortening on that page, marred somewhat by how not-very-good LeCastor's face is drawn. Hopefully that distracts from how his right hand only has four fingers while his left has the normal five.

   Panel layout-wise, we've got two big panels on the bottom and a normal-sized row on the top. Which makes sense, as there needs to be a lot of space for all those lyrics, and there's a location change in the middle of the song when he bursts out onto the street to continue singing in public his song about how great it is to have been hand-(hoof? half-hand, then) selected to perform highly illegal activities with one of the most wanted criminals in 1776 Old West. Yep.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 13

   Let's face it: nobody was surprised by this. It's Bollywood, so of course you knew there'd be at least one musical number. Complete with everyone dancing in the street Oliver-like, and three-part suspender-snapping harmonies featuring a criminal who appears to be in clown makeup. Yeah, that guy on top. Just get a good drink of him.

   Cailin brainstormed some of the lyrics on this one (men curse his name and beasts do the same!) The other parts are just shamelessly jacked from T.S. Eliot, "Macavity the Mystery Cat," which is kind of embarrassing because that's just shoehorned in there without regard to rhythm. (Or rhyme. Answer me quick, or I'll save you time, and tell you-ou-ou...) One! Two! Three! Four!

   And we learn that he stole all the gold (all of it!) straight from Fort Knox somehow. This information comes up later, because I needed a significant MacGuffin and I realized I had already Checkov'd this. I just put it in the song, though, because it rhymed. Those actually now I can remember I looked up if Fort Knox was even built by this time, for that lyric (I think it existed, but wasn't used as a vault yet?)

   I don't know what the deal with that guy with the big head and the weird face is, just standing there in the middle of the street with his hands behind his back like that while everybody else is just dancing around him.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 12

   Here, you can see emphasized, the fat stack of bills behind Rawhide. Quite the haul. Though, wait, no, never mind, I think that's the boards in the wall. Why would I have done that? I don't know.

  You can't see through the page here on Rawhide's "hero shot," because I drew that separately as a character study and liked it so much I cut it out and pasted it into the page. That happened with a lot of hero shots, notably the Sheriff Roadrunner. This is what I think started out using marker around the edges and incorporating the border for emphasis, to disguise the edges. The border goes straight into the brim of his hat in spite of this-- instead of circumnavigating the outside of the hat, which would make more sense as it would actually disguise the border of the cut-out and pasted original drawing, I drew the border onto the page of the hero shot, which is why you can't see it here.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 11

   That's it, the name drop of Pony Bill like I promised, named after, of course, Bill the Pony from the Lord of the Rings. (This was before Friendship is Magic, so there was nothing significant or ironic seen in having ponies back then. Maybe his name would have been Pony Joe...?)

   LeCastor notes Rawhide's cow ears, and naturally thinks he might be "an elf or something." I'm not sure if elves exist in this universe. Rawhide turns around, and that's the hero shot right there. Note the resemblance to a half-cow Leo DiCaprio. Note the cross around his neck. I guess there weren't as many religious themes in the comic as I thought there would originally be.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 10

   I must have switched markers for doing the panels on this page halfway, and I don't mean the red marker for that headshot. The bottom half has a whole lot more bleedthrough than the top half, yeah? i don't know why.

   Some really solid dramatic panels on this page, the top and bottom ones kind of echoing each other shape-and-character-and-panel-size-wise, not really for any preplanned reason, but, eh, it looks good.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 9

   The train in the background was added in after I think all of this page was done. The last thing added. I added that train for two reasons (yay two-itemed lists!)

1. The western was entirely trainless up to this point, and westerns need trains,
2. showing it in the background here emphasized how fast these guys were going, and I guess there's actually three items on this list instead of the promised two, because oh yeah
3. the glue from pasting in the drawing I did of the governor's daughter tied up on horseback  kind of stained the page, so I had to color that in brown to disguise it.

   Didn't do a very good job. Stopping a horse like that would probably not be good for the governor's daughter on the back of it, as it would just drop and send her flying. Presumably our good Sheriff runs up ahead and catches her.

   And then molests her, as revealed on page 23. I asked Cailin if he should molest her here, as at first he thought I meant Rawhide, which led to an interesting conversation. I don't know, I guess it would have been one of those things that would have been drawn (but not too explicitly!) had I had the time.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 8

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   LeCastor, we can see, is not clumped with the others and unhighlighted by the border frame, setting him apart in multiple ways (play he's the last to put on his hat.) Hat on, he also does not touch a border in the panel where they're all outside the bank sizing it up, further subconsciously specializing him in the minds of the audience (or at least I think that that's him not touching any of the borders in that panel there. I don't know- it's kind of hard to tell when they're all wearing hats like that.)

   Seeing the lines from this side emphasizes the guns coming out of nowhere in that last panel.Obviously the gun shooting the BLAT is important, because of the border there, but there's another gun just sort of... floating there. See it?Just right there in the corner.

    Speaking of guns floating there, you can see that you can't see the one coming off of frame above the ferret's head-- yep, that's because I had drawn the gun and was proud of it, so it's one of those literal cut-paste deals like with the hero shots.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 7

   The last thing said was "STOP," the first thing said here is "go." At least I can make the claim of that being deliberate. Find me clever?

   I took the time, with just minutes of the 24 hours left, to look up the word "bank" in... whatever that language is, I forget it now. Hindi, that was it. At least, I took that time and did that with the Rawhide Vindaloo logo. Maybe I had done this one sooner, as it was one of the first things I did on the map and realized I had already written "Canada" and "N.Y." in English.

   That... thing, there, looking surprised in the bottom right hand corner (FUN FACT: off of whom I modeled the surprised guy in Robert Ludlum's The Change Blindness)

Yup, there's a definite resemblance there.

is, not a weird-looking human or half-animal anything, but a ferret-sized ferret. Anthropomorphized into looking more like a human, but that's it, exactly it. He/she is the size of a ferret, and in the foreground here so it looks bigger.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 6

   Whoa, where's Sheriff Peckinwood's face here? You can see the bleedthrough of the other lines of ink, but where his face is it's a big blank. Why is that? It didn't bleed through, because, simply, I drew his hero shot on a different piece of paper so I wouldn't screw it up, (in fact, the paper of sketches and notes I showed you earlier,) and pasted it into the final frame later. Well, not the final frame, the third frame. The final version of that. See how I drew the extra panel bit in there, so it's like a fourth panel right there in the upper corner behind his head? I like that.

   That "STOP!" is a bit sloppy. At least, the S in it is.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 5

   Our introduction to SHERIFF PECKINWOOD, the roadrunner/woodpecker sheriff of Armadillotown. He's just chilling at the end of the room. He is, as we'll see later, not the best of dudes. I guess that's one of the things with this comic, you're not sure whom to root for, because the main characters are criminals. Huh.

   You've got the classic shot of the sheriff unfolding his arms and revealing that badge, the reveal to the audience who he is, which Cailin suggested. I just love those first couple of drawings of him. The hero shots, against which everything else is off-model. His legs and feet are just so awesome and well-drawn in that first panel, and then his entire face in the "keep the change" shot. Never could get his feather-finger wing-hands down, though.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 4

   This would have been a pretty symmetrical layout, with the bar panels in the middle and on the bottom and the two panels on the top, if not for that fact that the second panel unnecessarily long on the top. I guess it still is pretty symmetrical, but that's a disappointing missed opportunity.

   Note the light hanging down from the ceiling- the panel border used to represent the rope there. and how the light itself is part of the panel border. I still think that's pretty clever.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 3

   Rawhide turns, and we meet LeCASTOR, THE BALDING BOY BEAVER. Look, here, on that bottom panel, and you can see his beaver tail. I kind of reads like it's part of his long coat, but it's more clearly a tail later.

   He enters the बड़ा दालान. I also traced this one from a movie set, the big saloon establishing shot. It is an establishing shot of not just this bar but of the entire Rawhide universe. The scene here in the bar really does sum the entire thing up. How the genetics work, with that giant anthropomorphized Venus Flytrap there. It's drinking its mugs with its feet, cleverest thing ever.

   We debated a lot over the name of the horse gang. It was going to Wyld Sttallyns at first, in homage to both Bill and Ted and biker gangs, but then I realized that the head pony's name should be "Tony Pony" instead of Pony Bill as reported on page 11.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 2

   In order for this comic to be 24 pages long, we have to use the backs of the pages. It's alright, though. The marker bleeds through, which I guess is almost perfect for analyzing the page layouts, which are important especially in this comic where I experimented with them quite a bit. It's especially convenient because the marker is used not only for the panel borders but also with this unique technique where the marker is used for some outlines, making the edges bleed into the drawing. It gives this sort of exotic '70s feel and helping draw attention to what needs to be emphasized. I guess that only having 12 pages is a sort of blessing in disguise.

   See, look, here, the outlining helps give a sense of depth to the streets of Armadillotown and to the बड़ा दालान, where it looks like it's going deeper beyond the swinging doors. The map of the Old West, and on the bottom row of panels where the guy walking there transverses the panels.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Page 1

   1776. THE OLD WEST. Bollywood gets so many of its facts wrong, so Cailin and I figured this would be hilarious. It just comes off as being trippy, though. The map here, though, is actually accurate to the 1830s. I copied it off of Conservapedia, the whole time wondering, why would an encyclopedia about conservation have a map of Manifest Destiny-era United States? It turned out that that wasn't was Conservapedia was, at all, but...

   Armadillotown, Texas. Just an Old West movie lot set I copied or maybe even traced from Cailin's laptop. I just called it "Armadillotown" because... Well, I don't know. This comic came out like a year before the video game Dillon's Rolling Western was even announced, I think, so any armadillo-y similarities are entire coincidental, including that guy just rolling that barrel in the middle of the street for no reason. Also, see there's a little guy being ejected violently from the बड़ा दालान. He huffs off (I guess apparently that's him walking there,) and across the street we see, bathed in shadow, RAWHIDE VINDALOO, THE HALF-COW BANDIT. Originally his quasi-bovinity was going to be called Leatherneck, but that apparently means Marine and is unrelated to cowboys.

Rawhide Vindaloo w/ Commentary, Cover Page

   Crime! Passion! Toe-tapping musical numbers! Leonardo DiCaprio as Rawhide, Shia LaBeouf as LeCastor, and featuring photo-referenced Jeff Bridges as Rawhide's father.

   This, the cover page, is the last page I completed, and in fact I didn't get to "finish" all of it as, first of all, the swirls in the sky are only two colors, and second of all I couldn't find a translation of the word "vindaloo" into Hindi lettering. You can see I made a Hindi overlay of the translation of "Rawhide" (चमरा से बना हुआ) but I couldn't find the Hindi lettering for the word "Vindaloo." Isn't that word itself Hindi? What's going on there? Don't tell me it's Urdu.

   That's the same background there traced as the one on page 1. I'm not sure if it opens directly onto itself, like the street is on the cover and you flip to the next page but the image doesn't change.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 24

   I actually wrote this page fairly early on, when I had figured out exactly what the plot was. I wrote this here as a twist ending, then from the information revealed here worked out what other information needed to be told elsewhere. You can see why this would necessitate an out-of-order creation of the comic.

   I left the little page number "24" off on the bottom of the page accidentally. Oh well. Too late to change it now.