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.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 23

   Not much to say here, except, the infamous BZORT reappears one last time as the D'varri ship makes its way to the safe house. Right there in the lower right corner of the third panel there. The main character fellow, now in D'varri form, hears this BZORT in the corner and gets up just in time to see Ash's DNA dissolve, with her requisite little "!" They all do that. It's what you say hen your DNA gets dissolved. She blows away, Ash now Ash.

   See, I guess that makes all of their names puns. Ash, because of her inevitable fate, Dustin because he was a Roomba, Karen because, even though we did not see her outside of the main character's imagination, deep down she truly cared. I guess that makes the main guy's name, I don't know, Hiro Protagonist? Naw, already been done (hey, there, Stephenson fans!) Or, maybe, then, Hey, I'm Gonna Turn Into an Alien in the End? Oh, well. He does have a name... maybe.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 22

   This is one of the pages I drew earlier on. Well, maybe not entirely earlier on. I'll have to think about it. But this transformation sequence is where the D'Varri design comes from. In much the same way I got more audacious with the explosion on page 2, only more extreme, I was literally making up the design on the fly and pulling back and back and back from what a human looks like as the guy transforms. His nostrils become his mouths! Eventually I was as far back as I could get while still having it make sense with the path I started off on in the transformation, so you can see it slowing down there at the end once I was out of ideas.

   From this design I went back and added the shadow being cast across the veggie seller's cart all the way back on page one, forshadowing (so to speak) what was to come, and what the threat exactly was. You can also see it in the reveal shot of the Moldovian soldier's hologram. I think some of the more vague silhouettes in that before that were done before the alien design was finalized, because it didn't need to be at that point.

   During one of Joe's sarcastic readings of the page, he read the guy's hair falling out on into his hand as being his hand being on fire. Can you kind of see that? So I went in and made that more clear, by adding hair... sockets, I guess? and motion lines indicating where the hair was falling from. So, thanks, Stumps. If you look, you can also see the hair falling out of his hands there, which I also did not have originally and added, which effect I'm less pleased with but at least it's subtle.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 21

   The infamous nudie scene. His pertinent bits are covered by panel borders. It took me a lot of redrawing to get the proportions to fit so that that was possible, so yeah, I was very careful. The proportions of the panels work out, then.

   The proportions of the anatomy, not so much. He's from a slightly different angle in each panel! Which, hmm, maybe was deliberate. Never mind. The navel had to be redrawn and re-positioned quite a bit to make it clear that it was a navel and not, erm, something else.

   On the other side, though, the alien spaceship cuts a swathe of destruction through Reykjavik. It's kind of disappointing that there's an ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS naked man on the other side distracting from the really really good D'varri spaceship art on the other side. You can actually feel the camera pulling out. Just go back and pay attention to only the right hand side.

   Yeah.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 20

   Yep, he's human under all that half-of-his-face-is-a-beret-and-the-rest-is-a-robot. And yep, turns out he's a natural blond. And yep, he's taking off his clothes. I think the inherent nudity-ity of the situation is defused somewhat by his adorable tube arms, the way I drew him, when he's dropping his trou. Look at those arms!

   Ash is loving it more than she should, but it's okay, because in this morality play, the sin of Lust is quickly punished by throwing up a little into your mouth when you see exposed brain tissue. That's actually pretty gross. It's not really explained ever, why the guy is a cyborg, but I think it's pretty obvious: something happened to half of his head.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 19

   After using his cyber-vision to somehow see that BZORKing works on the molecular level, specifically by dissolving DNA, and having made it to the safe house where DNA modification technology exists that conveniently was in their path, this is the part where the relationship between Ash and the cyborg dude comes into play, and all that stuff before turns out to be important. DNA modification requires "starbolic" nudity (quasi-future slang! "Starbolic," as in "stark bollock(s)," meaning "naked," I just got from a slang encyclopedia. Useful those things.)

   So, the beret-wearing cyborg dude, Cystex-head, (I mean head of Cystex, but he does have a very distinctive head,) decides that in order to respect Ash, he should be the one to undress before she does so that he shouldn't have to look at a naked woman while he's still in human form, and, you know, into that kind of stuff. Now Ash can look at him naked instead of him looking at her naked. Respect! Except that Ash is known to have an interest in the cyborg man, while the cyborg man is stated to have no interest in her. Such a setup would only reward Ash's illicit lusts. Respect? R-respect, I guess. Remember, I'm allowed to nitpick at my own thing.

   Just this becomes very important. It is very important. The order in which this occurs.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 18

   The layout of this page is pretty sloppy. You see him dodging the D'varri motherships or whatever, but you probably couldn't tell until I drew your attention to it- now- that he's actually between two of them. That was initially clearer, but you can see I then kind of awkwardly overlaid a speech bubble that he was saying, to justify some parts of his relationship with Ash from here on (namely, why he doesn't want to look at her naked while he himself is perfectly alright with getting naked in front of her.) I guess that's a pretty significant thing, then. Drives on the sidewalk, bursts up a fire hydrant. It's one of those crappy Icelandic ones, eh.

   This guy's hardcore. He can tell if someone's DNA is dissolving just by looking at them. It's probably somehow related to his cyborg eye. His cyborg eye could see it, but his human eye- well, obviously his human eye was behind that beret, but, yeah. His human eye couldn't. That actually explains how he could tell that there were differential fractions encoded into the leaves on the trees of a painting just by looking at it. His eye's Superman.

   Also, aside from that and the Icelanding manor house this dude's apparently got, he's also got an Icelandic safe house with technology that allows you to replace your DNA. How, uh, fancy.

   That's it! This guy doesn't just work for Cystex. This guy is Cystex. He's their CEO or something. That explains why they didn't tell anyone about their discoveries. They didn't need to. He was the only person who needed to know. Adds an interesting layer to the Ash/main character dynamic, that's for sure.

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 17

   In Michelangelo's mural on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the pod of God when he creates Adam has the exact profile of a brain. Dan Browning it, we're saying that there's just no way that one of the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance could have known what a brain looked like, but he was influenced to paint it like that through subliminal processes telling him how anatomy works. Since that's basically the entire D'varri shtick, accidentally psychically implanting ideas of their own DNA into people, that fits. I think that was Joe's idea, using the Sistine chapel ceiling as the perfect analogy for how that works. Or Cailin's. Definitely not mine, as I didn't even know that, but, sure enough.

And then ASH SMOOCHING OUT OF NOWHERE. I'm not sure how clear it is that that's what's going on. So our hero boy delivers his spiel about how he can't return her love, because

1. He's technophilic, and
2. Even if he weren't, he's still married.

   The power of fidelity (except with robots) triumphs all!

Scourge w/ Commentary, Page 16

   It's the green remote control thing from the cover. II think that's the last piece assembled of all the cover items. Or at least, now with a D'varri mothership in the final panel, it is. Contained on the green thing? Ostensibly, code.

   But go on, assign those numbers somehow to differential fractals and to ACGT. I guarantee you that it won't work. 5s, 7s, and 9s don't even belong in quadnary code (it's like binary code, but with four I guess?) What you really need to derive from page is this: TECHNOBABBLE. I didn't know what I was saying, just as you don't know what I was saying. At least I know the difference between DNA and RNA?

The return of the infamous BZORT. It's been a while, old buddy.