3.08

Okay I SWEAR this is the last of the “oh look we are in an empty cabin” pages. If you ever start to doubt whether or not I love you, think back on October 2010 when I drew out these stupid pages to make your (eventually) sequential reading experience more sensical and enjoyable. And never doubt me ever again or I will have to send Dagre to sort things out with you.

Overdue comic pimp! In that I’ve been meaning to do it for a while and didn’t get to it until now… Bear Nuts is one of those comics where you’re convinced its drawn by a professional. Thankfully in this case, it actually is, haha, so you can stop stressing. I’ll be honest and admit that I read this comic more for the art than for the story (my personal preference isn’t generally towards cutesy-evil kind of stories), but for the type of comic it is I can tell you that it is very well done. If you like fun comics, try it out. And if you’re like me and enjoy looking at awesome cartoony drawing and some excellent color palettes, then you definitely should take a look!

All pages after this will actually have things going on, so hopefully I can manage to update sooner than next weekend T_T See you then!

58 Comments

  • dusky_rue

    But I like your cabin interiors! They’re interesting and obviously have a lot of thought put into them! It’s all about creating ATMOSPHERE for the scene. :P

  • Nico

    Your Bear Nuts link isn’t working… :(

    …and I agree with dusky! It’s adding an atmosphere to the scene! The calm before the storm so to speak…anticipating the next page! :)

    • Huh, that might be a problem with them or you? It’s working for me!

      • The link works fine for me. :) And I’m really glad you linked it, too. Bear Nuts deserves more love in all its innate weirdness. XD

        • Nico

          Ah there we go. It’s working now! Don’t know what happened, heh. ^.^;

  • Rah

    I am so excited about where the mysterious whispering is coming from!!!
    I don’t mind the empty cabin scenes, you draw them so well. :D

  • Tazzy

    I zoomed in on that faded out word balloon as far as my zoom would take me! I think I see the word “poop” in that second line.

    • Haha, if you can read my reduced, transparent scribbly handwriting, you deserve some kind of award.

      • Anthony

        Zoom in there. See the reflection? Invert it. ENHANCE!!!

        *gasp* The secret of life?!

  • Jac

    I have never doubted your love for the comic or its readers and I never shall. Atmosphere is crucial and you do it so beautifully, so even when your pages have no words at all written on them I still love them completely, because, if anything, I learn more from them as an artist and storyteller. :D

    • Thanks XD Pacing is also crucial but it’s one of the things I just have to let slide. A lot of people went back and reread chapters (or started on the comic late and read the chapters straight through), which negates the evil of these sparse updates to my conscience.

  • But I think these pages are awesome! :D A great pleasure to look at and study! I wonder if it’s because I am a fellow artist. Btw, loving the angle on panel 2! :) *thumbs up*

  • Mr.Tophat

    Indeed, of all the dusty empty cabins interiors I could look at, Yours is the absolute best…. Okay, that may not sound like much. But, seriously, your art is good enough to make up for it being a dusty empty cabin.

  • Superfiver

    I don’t know if you changed how you drawn Soli, but I love how Soli looks in this page! It’s like a different color style or something. I just know I like it so much that I finally decided to make my first comment on one of these pages.

  • Ryl

    I love the feeling of consternation/agitation that simply oozes from her in the third panel. Also, as a fellow female, I gotta love the standard bra-as-a-pocket trick (although in this case it looks to be more of a bandage-bound chest to keep her flat, but tomayto, tomahto).

    And in spite of what you say (and have shown us via the room coloring example you used on the last page) about the techniques being easy, I can’t imagine that it’s ‘easy’ to do by any means. Your attention to detail is incredible as always, too, what with the marred wooden tables and miscellaneous debris scattered everywhere. I just don’t know how you keep up with it. It’s amazing and it makes even these ‘zomg empty cabin’ pages a wonder to look at.

  • DoggySpew

    I think I’ve never seen the “hidden textballoon in the shadows” technique before. And I find it BRILLIANT ! What better way to have something that is so low-volume and unnoticible be represented in comic ( I mean “graphic novel”) form.

    • Thanks very much XD I make up my own conventions when it comes to those… if the balloon tail is connected to the frame, then it’s in the foreground of noise. If it is bordered by the frame (like here) then it is in the background. I did it before in the dining room scene in Chapter 2. Thinking too much…

  • Amber

    Wow, Soli looks like a girl! :P
    I love how you manage to convey expressions so well when her face is covered up.

  • I actually think that the most enjoyable online comics are the ones the artist treats like a book. It’s a sign of a well-developed aesthetic sensibility, and makes the experience more immersive. And from the looks of it it hardly does any damage to your readership so I say follow that impulse and don’t make excuses for it! Beautiful work here – been following silently from the start, but this sequence in particular struck me as a particularly attractive one.

    –M

  • Ohoo, someone’s coming !!

    Thanks for the Bear Nuts link, it looks fun and check-out-later-worthy ! :)

  • BentKatana

    I love these pages, they’re fantastic, you’re telling a story with no dialogue, that’s a skill! :D Oh damn, I’m gonna hafta try and decipher that word bubble now…I love how you did that last panel, by the way. AND I LOVE YOU :o

  • Darthricardo

    WHOA! Soli sprouted eyelashes!
    Seriously though, I’m really liking these pages. Dusty cabin interiors are totally cool with me. Keep up the good work!

  • hel

    This mood is very (Cormac)McCarthian. Which in my opinion is a very good compliment :P
    Also, the mood is perfect, another page of empty cabin exploration has been more than fine! Stop worrying about what ‘the public’ needs because what the story needs is just perfect.

  • mandy

    Homegirl needs to get a manicure.

    • I think the haircut needs to come first.

  • sweet_gardenia

    ” That damn chinchilla is in here somewhere. ”

    I assume that’s her To Kill list she’s pulling out. Oh and I love your interiors. You’re building up an omnious mood quite nicely. WHO’S THAT WHISPERING IN THE CORNER omai

  • Another comic you might wanna check out is Spinnerette: http://www.krakowstudios.com/spinnerette/ It’s an awesome spoof of Spiderman, although the boobiness may be a bit much at times. :P

    • Yeah, I’ve seen it… good art, but the story doesn’t do anything for me (in a bad way).

    • kawaiidesukitty

      I hope you got paid to plug that awful comic otherwise I’m not sure why you plugged that awful comic

      • Like I said in the comments, it’s an excellent example of good sequential storytelling and artistry. The exaggerations and panelling are really impressive to me! Your mileage may vary, of course :)

  • jy

    argh I sincerely thought that there was a word called “sensical”. Love her >( face in the third panel haha!

  • Kie

    I love girls with flat chest/binder. Soli is AWESOME.

  • Van Aleph

    You could illustrate a book just about empty cabins and I would buy it!

  • jmaccabeus

    Something’s wrong. Soli looks positively _feminine_ in that last panel (probalbly because, as noted earlier, she’s grown eyelashes). Then again, there’s also something to (what we can see of) the shape of the nose and cheek, so… anyway, keep up the good work!

    Anyway, I suppose I’m glad that these pages are finishing up, if only for your sanity, apparently. Though it is nice to set the mood… sometimes you just need a few pages for that.

    (“Masts”? Now I’m curious. A shipbuilder?)

    …Okay, I’ll stop rambling.

  • yim-yam

    oh my god! i love the art in these pages in the cabin! I can see why it’s taking you a while to update! that and you have a life outside of meek lol

  • Poor Sobbing Sob

    GIVE THIS LADY A STUDIO!

  • Well, that Yochva

    Well, that bandage you revealed in this page would explain why I didn’t think Soli was a girl. Nice job, normally I can tell when someone’s a girl, but yours look so natural and sometimes girls don’t look like girls. And sometimes they bind their breasts. ^_^

    • Wood

      Actually the bandage was shown on earlier pages, but you had to look really closely.

  • Gothy77

    did anyone else notice the almost completely transparent writing in the last panel?

    • Sheperd

      It’s kind of hard to ignore.

      First time commenter. I like the artwork. I’ve been trying to place the style with another comic but I’m coming short. It reminds me of Avatar:the last airbender.

  • Mr.Dude

    didnt this comic used to be about a naked wild girl with green hair? why does the story keep changing?

    • There are three storylines, which are all part of one big story. Next chapter will get back to Angora and you’ll start to see the ramifications of previous chapters!

  • Pneumonica

    It would seem somebody is having a cigarette, and is puffing out text balloons. Very neat effect.

    Soli gains a strangely feminine touch in the last panel, which is kind of neat. Probably a “profile” thing – I’m not an artist, I don’t know. I tried to be an artist once. I’m really just a soulless cog in a machine. On the plus side, I get to read comics like this and not worry too much about how they’re made. XD

    Also, Soli’s obviously a woman. Look at where she stores her stuff.

    • jmaccabeus

      My equally non-artist self noticed how Soli looks in the last panel as well… part of it seems to be the eyelashes appearing, and part of it seems to be the way the cheek and nose appear under the bandanna. Maybe. That’s what I’m noticing, at least.

      • Pneumonica

        You could be correct. It seems like there’s a softer look on her face. Not that Soli’s been a grim servant of death this whole time, far from it. But she’s not been a really “soft” person up until that image. I think it’s a neat effect. Then again, I’ve wanted to hug Soli since I first saw her.

  • Nerfherder

    The ambient effects just keep getting better in your art. Nice job on the “empty cabin”, looking forward to seeing more. Cheers.

  • I honestly have to say, if there was ever a graphic interpretation of muffled voices behind a wall, you’ve essentially nailed it.

    Tres cool effect.

  • Yas

    In that first line, last word, I think I see ‘judge’ and in the last line, last word, I see ‘undertaking’. :D
    Then again- I could be on crack.

  • Doubt your love for us? Nevah!

    Something in her posture in panel one makes me happy. Immediately pictured the motion that went with it.

  • Cherry B.

    *Luffs all over Soli* >.< I like where she keeps her documents. Cute!

    Hopefully that speech bubble leads to something really interesting! I'm anxious!

    Also, I'm glad you read/saw Bear Nuts! I like it and that's where I found out about The Meek! :D

  • My understanding is that it’s Soli who is looking around the cabin, and he’s a he. Maybe I just didn’t read carefully enough, and somewhere we were told that Soli was a woman, and I just assumed he was a man because of stereotypes. He looks like a man to me, although a young one.

    I had expected, in the previous arc, that the eyes in the window on page 2.26 were those of Angora… I suppose, in fact, that that was Dagre, instead. I guess it will not be for a while yet until we see how the three story arcs tie together, particularly as they seem to be widely separated in time. The first and second ones could be contemporary, just in places at different technical levels, but the third seems like it has to be happening much later. Or are they happening in different worlds?

    • I feel gender conventions are tricking a lot of people here. Soli isn’t drawn stereotypically female so she must be male!!1 Another example was that ambassador earlier in chapter 2 and even after it was clearly stated in-comic that she is female people were still assuming that she must be male because she didn’t have the stereotypical gender markers.

      The story bits are happening in different parts of the same world.

    • Maja

      He’s a she – first bit of evidence is the “cast” page. She’s on a mission to kill her ex-boyfriend. That’s a breast-binding cloth she’s wearing. These activities are illegal…presumably she’s tricked out like a guy to avoid detection/because being a female got her screwed over/it sucks to walk in heels in the desert/some other reason. Those would be my assumptions without knowing more backstory!

      Also, as per my understanding, nothing is happening in a different world. It’s all on the same continent, in fact, at roughly the same time, but there is a lot of racial ignorance/hatred which makes the three main peoples not know about/incorporate each others’ technological advances. Luca’s palace also had floor-to-ceiling glass windows a la skyscrapers…I’d be HIGHLY surprised if their level of technology isn’t higher than what they let on most of the time.

  • spiffy

    i REALLY like how you made the speech bubble all scribbly and discreet. such subtlety warms my heart. <3

  • Ah, so it’s a list for boat parts? Makes sense she’d be in a work shop lol.

  • Nate

    -Sigh- I’m at the wrong quest marker. Great.

  • You just got pimped by Scott McCloud on his blog. Congratz! If that’s not making it somewhere in this day and age I don’t know what is… :)

  • Silverance

    Okay, I know I’m mildly crazy and I feel like what I’m reading is a long shot, but what I see in the text box is

    “This is hidden right in my head, people had help mythology/monolopy”

    I think that last bit’s wrong. It’s bugging me not knowing what it says though.

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