Thumbnail Dump: Escape Route

Oh, Escape Route.

You were a tough one to handle.

Or maybe not? Because of course you all noticed that a huge portion of this chapter is directly from “Another Trip”! So how hard could making it have been?!?!? OTHER THAN ME HAVING TO ESTABLISH SO MANY BACKGROUNDS.

THE GREYSCALE HELPED BUT

YOU KNOW

i work so hard for you guys ;_;

Anyway, I thought there was so much development in BCI’s Another Trip that I felt it deserved to be an existing chapter of its own, especially since in the Another Trip storyline, Lucy learns about Augustus’ allegiance to Alejandro. 

And this page explicitly shows Lucy knows about that allegiance in the actual timeline.

So how could Lucy have learned about Alejandro? That’s where I remembered Another Trip again and thought.. man it was TOO GOOD. 

It had to be canon! So I thought about Lucy forcing herself into the bus another day, during the time she and Augustus were still at awkward odds with each other.

AND HILARITY ENSUES!!!

Let’s start off with a few choice sketches, I really liked Lucy’s expression on the third panel. There’s a common struggle that happens where I think a sketch looks so good that I try to mimic it entirely during the inking stage, but sometimes a sketch really shows its flaws when you start inking over it.. and the sketch can’t really be recreated without accepting a lot of wonkiness. I’ve in the past full-on inked over a sketch and accepted the wonkiness anyway, but it’s not something I like when I look back on it. The flaws show. This panel was an example where I had to eventually ignore the sketch and redraw the face entirely to not.. look terrible.

I think the original sketch when being rendered just made her look kinda lifeless, you know? When I was actually inking it out. 

It doesn’t help that she’s staring.. straight ahead. She should be looking down at Augustus!

Like so!

god backgrounds are my weakness. I was eyeballing this bed and couldn't for the life of me figure out why it felt so weird. I DUNNO. UGHHHH

So I tried to do that.. tiled floor thing lots of prostrat artists do, to see if that would fix things. I think it helped?? I still have a lot of worries about it.

I like that I drew Augustus' whole body on the bed to make sure that Lucy wasn't being slenderman. It's easy to have that happen, I certainly used to do it often with the pets. They would look like they're floating or on a shoebox :-[ 

I pretty much had this sequence fully thought out that moving it from thumbnail to sketch was very easy. The scribbled off pages you see in the bottom-middle are actually from the Paulo/Lucy sequence in High Expectations! Yes, I struggled with that sequence SO MUCH that it bled onto thumbnails for entirely different chapters!

Some scenes from Another Trip were pretty straightforward in how little I changed.

While other others got totally mangled to fix the page better/make things more interesting. One interesting thing about BCIs is that they are drawn with three grids in mind, but normal BCB pages have four. Which means I have more wiggle room when translating BCI to BCB pages. It allows me to not make things feel as squished, and to spread out as necessary. 

This chapter is interesting because there's a huge gap in the thumbnailing process - because technically Another Trip WAS the thumbnail! I already did the sequence! I just needed to tweak it/draw it better. Hence you see 9-22 in this page. Those pages are taken from Another Trip. I just needed to create a beginning sequence to segway into it - which are page 8 and 9. 

I had this really huge idea for making a looooong infinite canvas sequence, which is the nightmare Lucy had. It turned out to be impossible to achieve in full because the canvas was too long. So that's why we cut the sequence into a few updates. MY IDEAL SITUATION WAS POSTING IT ALL IN ONE GO. 

I still made sure to number it accordingly because while I like playing with infinite canvas once in a while, this comic will still be collected into a book, so I gotta be mindful of the pages! 

I bounced around between which character to introduce first in the sequence, you can see that I originally had Sue approach Lucy first, with Paulo butting in, and there was a period of time I wanted Paulo to be on his own! Did a few swaps here and there, extracted some dialogue from Confrontation. 

The nightmare sequence bumped this chapter into a pretty huge amount, even though the online reader won't really notice it. It'll be a slog in book-form. 

Lucy’s trauma in Confrontation is something that hasn’t been explored very much, which I’ve had people tell me is.. unusual. Lucy got sexually assaulted in Confrontation, she got beat up and really terrible things happened to her. But she just carried on through Volumes 1–3 not really bringing it up again and just living “normally.” How? Why? 

I mean, in all honesty it’s not that unusual (And also Lucy has absolutely not been living normally lmao). Bad shit happens to people, and people often internalise it. It’s very common for assault victims to feel that doing something about the assault is more a headache than just.. dealing with the aftermath on your own. And Lucy is a person that so very often "deals with it."

It’s interesting talking about this, being someone who has experienced terrible things in my past, and honestly I was the same as Lucy! So much the same as Lucy that when I drew Confrontation at the age of 18, I STILL was in that mode of internalisation! Isn’t that funny? I was carrying on with the abuse that happened, feeling like I was one of those “good victims” who didn’t lash out or show any mental illness. Bad stuff happened so long ago, right? Why would it bother me now? It’s over!

I remember for the next few years hearing people be all “man the shit that happened to lucy was pretty freaken bad huh?” and my broken-ass brain was like “yeah but whatever, she dealt with it! She’s tough! It wasn’t THAT bad! Coulda been worse!”

And then I hit my 20s where eeeeeeeverything caught up to me and hit me like a ton of bricks 

So I dunno. I honestly have little regrets about the way Lucy dealt with the aftermath of Confrontation, because it feels so personally real to me, real to me in the sense that I literally was in her shoes and once the past abuse hit me, I was developed enough as a writer to be able to reflect that on Lucy.

So yeah, this is a really heavy chapter, and kind of personal, because it’s all coming together. And more will come together, because it’s certainly not over yet.

Gonna try not to end on a bleak note, so here are some post-chapter edits I did! Very often I’ll finish a chapter and then reread it in hopes that I can fix some art annoyances. There’s always an expression or a pose that I accept will “look passable” because I want to move on. I hate it when that happens, because often I’ll come back to the drawing and try to tweak it so I’ll stop feeling that way, but it can be a losing fight.

That is why I’ll come back to the chapter once it’s over, because I hope by then I’ll have improved enough that I can figure out WHY something looked wonky. Because I’ll have “fresh” eyes. So here are some panels where I left the drawing as is, but came back and tweaked so that I could like it!

Lucy felt so flat in this, I ended up tilting her head up a bit more to look like she’s actually getting shaken a bit. 

This is another example of me trying to ink a sketch directly because I love the way the sketch looked, but her eyes look lopsided on her face! It’s a good face, but just looks weird!

I hated how Lucy’s eyes looked on this page, and this page was pivotal!! I actually looked up references of soft-eyed anime characters to see WHAT they were doing right that I was.. messing up on. Because Lucy had ugly dinnerplate eyes that were also veering on trying to be proportional to a natural eye? So it looks really uncanny? It’s hard to explain the discomfort I felt. 

Anyway this screenshot of Sakura helped me make her eyes look better. It’s always Cardcaptor Sakura that fixes things! I always look at my CCS manga when I’m trying to draw Sandy lol

AND THAT’S THAT.