Hello all, and welcome to yet another unusually named RAWRweekly!
Not a awful lot to say this time round, except that I’m feeling pretty good regarding Bata Neart right now. I’ve actually started pushing my ‘manga’ out to various sites, and that is in lue of my pending ‘live-launch’ of the comic.
You probably wonder what I mean by ‘live-launch’. Well…Chapter 1 of Bata Neart wasn’t supposed to have been released as a once-a-week web-comic. I had originally intended to publish all 25 pages of that Chapter all at once as introduction special, while I supplied Chapter 2 in weekly doses. But alas, due to time restrictions and my need to launch Bata Neart in 2011, I had to launch Chapter 1 in weekly updates.
There’s a problem with this, which readers of Bata Neart may already have noticed. Chapter 1 contains no narrative. It’s just one long action sequence, and seeing such a thing in weekly bursts doesn’t really work. It was supposed to be read in one go, and until that was possible I didn’t want even try to advertise the comic.
But Chapter 1 is very nearly finished! And with that, I have finally begun my re-draw of Chapter 2!
I’m going to supply more details on that in the next (and hopefully final) ‘Bata Neart Begins’. In summery, most of the Chapter 2 and 3 pages are really old work from 2005, and some contain serious continuity errors. For example Aoife, a major main-cast character in the series, had a completely different design in Chapters 2 and 3, than I had intended for her. Eventually, I remembered the design I had wanted for her, and used it in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Now that I’m redrawing, I’m going to fix that problem, but also clean up a lot of the scene work.
It’s a very rewarding feeling to see a lot of my scenes coming to life again. Here’s a few examples:
Here is the Chapter 2's Original Page 2
And here is the 2012 remake
You’ll notice that a few things have changed over the years. First off, I no longer draw the speech bubbles and frames by hand. I learned later on that it was much better to do that work on computer.
The Original Page 3
The 2012 remade Page 3
In page 3 you’ll clearly notice the problem I have with Aoife. She’s got black hair, a pig-tail and a massive bow on her head. I had originally intended for her to have long flowing ‘dark’ hair and a ‘head-band’ wrapped around her forehead. During my original draw of Chapter 2, I forgot this design, and opted for the design you see here. Ultimately, I could never make this design work, so I scrapped it in favor of a re-design what was more faithful to my original intention.
Alas, by the time I decided to redesign Aoife, I had drawn her in 2 complete chapters. So this meant, if I want to keep her design consistent I would have to redraw all of Chapter 2 and 3. That is what I’m doing now, and I’m glad for it. Now I can breath some new life into this very old comic of mine.
In the final part of Bata Neart Begins, I will cover the far trickier task of re-mastering Chapter 1, which is 50/50 new and old material spliced together (often on the same page).
Chapter 2 of Bata Neart will be here sometime over the next month, so look forward to that!
Have a great week!
RAWR
