A Balanced Defensive Line Route, Page 0

First off - we'll be doing another update later in the day as our more standard update for the 10th. We've got something in mind planned as a Superman tie-in but it isn't quite ready yet so we figured we'd post this first and handle it later on. Yeah, so I've mentioned before that I want to do an ongoing comic based on The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, and while the poll last month came out in favor of not really needing context enough people said they preferred to have it that I decided to go ahead and do this anyway. This should pretty much cover all of the major prerequisite info for where the story starts, and we'll have some other cut-ins from Shinigami where necessary to explain smaller things within the pages proper. Reasons for going with her, rather than actually a character from the game itself, are pretty much as laid out here; she just seemed like a fun option and I liked the idea of doing this with someone who isn't actually pat of the cast and thus doesn't really need to get around the whole, "They're the narrator but also not," problem you see sometimes. Not a crazy huge thing but do hope everyone enjoys seeing her padded here at least, kind of not ruling out doing some future Rain Code-focused stuff with her where we see the same since while she was kind of surprisingly complex to draw I did enjoy doing it. This was originally going to be the first page of a batch of them going up, but it kind of became clear as I wrote the next page that this comic is going to work best with longer pages released at less regular intervals rather than the smaller content drops like with our other ongoing series. I'll try and get out the next one ASAP, but it's pretty heavy so it's likely going to take a little bit, especially since I'm kind of still getting used to the art style. For the most part I'm pretty happy with how this turned out but there is room for improvement, especially in how I drew Nozomi. Spent awhile trying to polish her up and eventually settled on, "Fine, good enough." Speaking of I did initially wonder about doing a second introduction page entirely consisting of introducing the members of the SDU beyond just Takumi, Eito, and Nozomi covered here (and Kurara being in that first panel with no elaboration for now) buuuut that'd take awhile and the Shinigami notes thing works for explaining them so we'll just be doing that. All of the initial LDA crew is in the first page proper so we'll be going through the introductions quickly at least.