Commentary: Pages 40-41

Page 040 - Man on a Mission

So, these controls. I liked the idea of at some point actually depicting how Last Gun’s controls work. My first idea was a bonus page that had an image of the manual, but after going to an arcade with some mates I realised the controls for these are more often printed directly on the device. Of course it is! Who the hell is gonna read the manual when they’ve just punched in a coin or two playing Metal Slug 2 down at the pub? 

That simplified things, just show the controls with the obligatory console shot every transition has. That left what the controls should actually be. Nix doesn’t have fingers, so there’s limits to what kind of actions she can perform with her wings. She can slap a button, but she can’t easily grip a joystick. There’s a pretty substantial overlap here with accessibility and disability in videogames, and I did spend some time researching adaptive controllers and the like to consider what a comfortable setup might be. I didn’t end up getting to use much of that, in the end: Nix’s particular limitations around her mobility don’t really line up with any real-world disabilities enough to use anything 1:1, and the control scheme still had to be recognisable as an arcade cabinet.

Last Gun’s first outdoor area appears here. I went with a minty green sky because that really is the most alien colour I can think of for a sky. Think about it! Every other slice of the colour pie can be associated with the different periods of sunset and night, but only green never turns up in any natural capacity.

Peri peeps:

I LOVE the seafoam green sky. Huge fan. Probably one of my favorite setting details in the entire comic.

When drawing these panels I liked to think of the environment as being built like a typical outdoor area in one of these games. Look at those buildings behind Cliff: the camera is angled down but they’re still so far away! Presumably that ledge behind Cliff is a straight dead drop, forming a boundary of the map the player can’t proceed past while still offering them a view of distant areas.

In the next panel we see another distant lower area, surely also a dead drop, but I like to think this one also doubled as a playable space. Probably somewhere that Cliff will access later, on his way to the final objective. It's a wide open area, but still constrained by the pipe on the left and the fence at the far right, funneling towards the door that leads toward the last comms tower.

It’s kind of a funny way to approach environments? Usually when you’re drawing a background you’re putting details in to enhance its believability, but here we’re, like, another meta-level up, adding details environments to make them feel believable as part of another fictional work. Fun stuff!

We need Cliff to encounter Allen now, and he could well have just walked into a room and saw him normal-style. That was what the original script had. Peri put a stop to that, though. She said to me, “What is this yaaaawnfest? He just walks in a room? We gotta put butts in seats here, Lum, but with this script the only thing we’re puttin is those goons ta sleep! You know what this scene needs? Action! Explosions! I want to see Cliff gettin BLASTED into dat weird-ass cathedral by somethin BLOWING UP and I want it on my desk by FIVE PM, STAT!”

I may be paraphrasing somewhat.

Peri promises: No, I definitely said it exactly like that.

She was right, though. I did make the single tweak that Cliff dodges out the way of an explosion instead of being caught by it. Our man’s just too damn skilled to ever take a direct hit like that.

Peri presents:

On the topic of making things more exciting, I remember that another detail we added into this page was putting Cliff leaping out of the exploding comms tower in panel 1. Originally, that panel was just the explosion, but I like the addition of tiny Cliff for a couple reasons. First, it helps give a sense of scale, since we can’t assume our readers will be naturally familiar with the structure and size of alien architecture. In the same vein, it helps track the geography of the scene–we know that Cliff was just in that last tower, and so it sets up the expectation (with the help of the dialogue) that he’s heading to the next tower when we see him in panel two. (This is especially helpful because the exploded tower isn’t visible in the background of panel 2, so it’s not immediately obvious how those shots are situated relative to each other!) And the final reason… well, it’s action! Explosions! It shows Cliff Mason being a stone cold badass and that puts butts in seats!

Page 041 - Imprint

It’s never a good day when you gotta draw some chains. Chains are da worst. They’re just intricate enough to demand your attention, but they’re repetitive enough you can’t derive enjoyment from it. But fate forces my hand at times as these, if you’re gonna be bound up in something in a manner that is symbolically impactful you better believe it’s gonna be chains. Like, c’mon, who binds a prisoner up in ropes?

Peri makes public: Chains, Zabelle’s hat, and the chest piece of Mercy’s suit. I’m making a list of all of Lum’s least favorite things to draw in Foreach. Gosh, I remember Lum absolutely relishing drawing the panel where Cliff shoots the chains down. Sounded pretty cathartic.

Bad news for them is that the chains have a scheduled reappearance down the line. But you didn’t hear that from me. 🫢

It’s Allen! Cliff’s little fucked up angel baby. The idea of Cliff getting some kind of Thing to protect. It’s a pretty natural direction for his character. We’ve established that he has a family, now we get to spend a bit of time showcasing how those fatherly instincts manifest while still keeping within the genre conventions of Last Gun. It’s a pretty classic move to give a player a littleguy to care about in an otherwise harsh and desolate setting, goes all the way back to Metroid 2 on the Game Boy. This would eventually grow into the Dadgames of the 2010s, starring gruff harshmen making the hard choices for their biological and/or surrogate children. Cliff joining their ranks notably doesn’t quite break the genre of his world, it just shifts the character of it, just a little.

Allen’s also pretty handy for another reason: they give Cliff someone to talk to. Foreach is a dialogue driven narrative on a structural level! So a character who doesn’t have any reason to speak can be difficult to write around. I recall we had a few difficulties surrounding that in chapter one, trying to convey information without having Cliff speak it, because I didn’t feel Cliff had a compelling reason to say it out loud. There’s ways we could have cheated that, true, but also… having him be silent in those sequences also helped to emphasise his isolation. And so when Allen comes onto the scene, we can feel that contrast in Cliff’s mood with how much chattier he gets. 

Designwise, Allen was always described as a “weird angel baby”. They’ve got one of the more human-like angel designs, two shut eyes and a mouth, I wanted them to look like something Cliff could easily imprint upon. Look at ‘em! So adorable, so helpless. Their eyes are always shut, kinda like a newborn, and they don’t have any limbs besides their limp little wings. Their body, bound up in silks like that, it almost looks like… well. I don’t think I should say just yet.

Peri ponders:

This is one of those times when we’re a bit hamstrung by the fact that we’re posting these commentaries a mere two chapters behind when new pages go up. Frankly, we haven’t seen very much of Allen yet! At this point in the story, they’re more object than character, something for Cliff to project onto rather than a person with agency and power to affect the world around them. But seeing what Cliff chooses to project onto them is useful, as it is very revealing about where his head is at right now! And as for Allen, well, there’s still plenty of comic left. :)

These first person panels are important to me, because I like harkening back to the FPS perspective as a fun videogame reference – sort of a reminder of the type of protagonist that Cliff is. At some point all of Cliff’s scenes might have looked like this! That was for a more ambitious version of Foreach, which would have been a faux-let’s play video series rather than a comic. Perhaps that’s a story for another time.

There’s unique challenges presented here. The gun, for one. Guns are already not so easy to draw, they’re specialised machines with odd proportions you don’t see often in life. Now try drawing them from an extreme perspective, with the gun held such that the front is furthest away from the viewpoint, while the back disappears into the edge of the frame. It’s a pain in the arse, I’ll tell you what!

Peri repines:

“Just trace the guns,” I tell them. I’m always saying this. Just trace the guns! (←person that has never drawn a gun in her life)

The second issue is that the first person perspective imposes restrictions on the composition. For one you gotta reserve some space in the corner for the aforementioned gun. And don’t forget the muzzle flare, too, which can eat into the frame if you’re not careful. And then on top of all that, the center of the frame is occupied by whatever Cliff is shooting! The shooting action here is important, don’t get me wrong, but take a look at that panel: The focal point probably ought to be Allen, but the restrictions of the form mean they end up a little off center, shoved to the side in favour of the breaking chain. But they still need to be emphasised in the frame, so they end up kind of uncomfortably close to the firing line here.

Peri paraphrases:

This is actually something that Lum once said to me which really stuck with me (though I think I’ve seen similar ideas referenced elsewhere too.) Which is that when you’re locked into the perspective of a first-person protagonist, particularly one in a shooter who wields a weapon by default, the act of looking is necessarily the same as the act of pointing a gun at it. In this way, the mere act of looking at someone becomes an act of implied violence. Either your weapon is out and you’re literally pointing a gun at them while you talk or interact, or you’re a mere button press away from doing so. How would this color the perspective of someone like Cliff, who lives in that mode all the time? Would you start treating everyone around you as a potential target, in a way? It’s something I think about a lot as we keep advancing Cliff’s character arc.

A version of this panel that didn’t self impose this restriction would be composed a little differently, probably with the breaking chains and Allen equally spaced apart. But, still, I like shifting to Cliff’s perspective for this one panel and I’m happy with how it turned out. Art’s always about tradeoffs! I like what this one contributes, putting you directly into his position for that flash of anger.