Commentary: Pages 22-23

Page 022 - Wash Away

At long last, we get a good look at this guy!

Cliff’s suitless design was meant to hit upon the intersection between two archetypes: he’s a BJ Blazkowicz style mountain of muscle, but he’s also an outgoing, friendly dude you could see yourself cracking open a cold one with. He should look equally at home on the battlefield and behind a grill.

I identified the ideal point of contrast here should be the hair. Everything about him could be standard action hero – the build, the stubble, the jawline – but his haircut would be what makes seem down to earth. Give him something a little more fashionable than the standard issue military buzzcut.

But what haircut specifically should that be? Answering that took a whole lot of iteration. Here’s some early work on that:

Of these, my favourite was actually the curly haired look on the left! There was just something about it, real unique flavour. There’s a world out there in which that’s the look of Cliff Mason, honestly, the only reason I didn’t go with it was that I was having a lot of trouble drawing him consistently like that.

Drawing him consistently at all remained a pretty significant concern for me right up until the last second. Big part of Foreach’s visual identity is that each world has a completely different visual style, going Cartoon to Anime to Rough Sketch to a semi-realistic Western Comics style with Last Gun. But even at the point when I’d actually started Foreach, I still wasn’t yet comfortable drawing humans in that semi-realistic style. I hadn’t even nailed down exactly how I’d planned to stylise their eyes at that point!

So, in the weeks between starting Foreach and then actually drawing this page, I ended up spending a lot of time just drawing Cliff. One advantage of the setting in Last Gun was I didn’t need to get good at drawing humans more generally, I only had to get good at drawing two of them. And Mercy doesn’t even really become a major player until Chapter 3, so really I only needed to be good at one! That made it a lot more achievable for me to get my skills up to an acceptable level in time for the page to come out.

I did have contingencies in place. If I really couldn’t get the style nailed down in time, I’d planned to go with an emergency variation on Cliff’s design that was a little more within my comfort zone, which would’ve looked something like this sketch I’d made at the time:

Fortunately it didn’t come to that. Or… maybe unfortunately? Cliff still is the character that gives me the most trouble, and I end up spending a lot of time getting him right on pages where he features. It certainly would have saved me a lot of effort if I went with the style shown above. Ah well! Foreach is riddled with decisions like that which only made my life harder, decisions that I on some level regret But even if you gave me the opportunity to go back and start over, I’d still do em all just the same. Sometimes you gotta make a sacrifice for the work herself, so that she can be the most correct execution of the thing she is.

Speaking of correct execution, let’s talk about the Foreach Panel That Turns You Bisexual:

When I showed Peri this one she asked me, and I’m paraphrasing here – “Not that I’m complaining, but why Cliff fanservice? Why this character, and why the cheesecake?”

And it’s a good question! And it’s a question with a number of answers. And I mean the first and most obvious is, yknow. Look at him. Don’t you wanna lick him dry? Wait maybe I shouldn't write that one down

Peri repines:

For the record, I don’t even LIKE cheesecake all that much.

ANYWAY there were other reasons as well! Let’s scratch one of the mundane ones off the list here which is that, honestly, this is a good way to get in some anatomy practice. Muscles are hard, and Cliff is ALL muscle! And it’s kind of a design element that he’s always wearing those shirts that are a size too small, so if I wanna keep drawing him, I gotta make sure I know what all those muscle groups are and how they move. It’s not like I can reference myself for this mountain of muscle like I do for the anime girls. 

And yeah, I don’t have to put my anatomy practice in the comic, but come onnn! I put all that effort in, the least you could do is let me show off a little.

That leads well into the next reason, which is that, like, I just got done drawing all those sexy girls in the Love Bomb chapter, and yeah, that makes sense there for the genre, sure. But I also kinda wanted to balance things out a little bit! Hot men AND hot women! A little something for everyone! It’s part of a kind of honour system I abide to, that if I’m going to draw some sexualised girl designs I ought to give the same treatment to the boys as well. There’s nothing I dislike more than when a work of fiction holds its women to a different standard of beauty to its men, and I do everything in my power to avert that. But, in addition to the honour thing… I also kinda wanted to show off? Like check me out, I can draw hotties of ALL genders. I’m versatile, baby! Maybe vain but honestly showing off comprises an embarrassing amount of my drive as an artist so, sue me.

In addition to all of these incredibly shallow explanations for my artistic choices here, I did also have a reason for how this actually serves the narrative. Shocking, I know! But I liked this moment as a transition point between Cliff the unstoppable murder machine and Cliff the normal everyday guy. Like, he takes off his helmet and his armour, and suddenly he’s doing normal dude things. He’s making dinner, he’s having a shower, it’s a nice wind down from the intense action we just walked away from. And the little extra bit of sexiness here, I think it adds to that rather than distracting from it. Thinking about how nice it might be to sidle up to this guy and get your arms round him is something you probably weren’t thinking of when he was blasting aliens to death. You’re seeing him in a new light now, not as the killer he is in the stars, but as the husband and father he was back on Earth.

There's also other panels on this page but really who gives a shit about those. Okay FINE. I put BABA in this one:

Peri whoops: BABA! IS! KEY!

(Get it? Because it’s made out of a key card? Eh??)

As a little easter egg, there’s also a blue doggy and a yellow lizard, which could easily be taken as foreshadowing of Cliff being familiar with certain characters that the reader also might recognize…

I think the keycard animals here may have been Rhys’ idea? Probably were. He’s always coming up with brilliant ideas like that, the bastard. 

Peri interrupts:

Gasps dramatically How DARE! That was my idea! >:0

Lum counterresponds: In my defense, uh, you both have four letter names. And P looks sorta like R, and who even reads past the first letter anyway? So its totally reasonable to mix you up.

I do remember the original version of this page had Cliff just looking at a calendar like “sorry I missed your birthday little guy” and I know for sure Rhys correctly identified that this Sucked Shit. He didn’t actually phrase it like that but he SHOULD have, because he would have been RIGHT. The problem is it’s a cliché, right? And the problem with a cliché is you’ve seen it so many times before you don’t actually feel it anymore, it’s all just symbols to you now. You can’t tease emotions out of an audience with the same old tunes, you gotta break em out of the pattern. 

Peri protests:

LIES! This part was also me!   (╯°□°）╯ ┻━━┻

…okay, Rhys helped too. Let me explain. The initial version of this page was completely wordless. Lum wanted the silence to stand in stark contrast to the blamblamblam action hero sequences to really accentuate Cliff’s loneliness up here in space. However, it resulted in panels that had descriptions like this:

Cliff looks a little... displeased? He's uncomfortable. His expression says "man am I kinda mad about being stuck up here in space for however many years, not having seen my family in all that time." It's a complicated expression.

This was… well, that is a lot of information to convey in a single facial expression. 

Lum counterresponds: I want it on the record that I totally could have pulled this off

I wanted to back up that emotional beat with some words as well. However, since the Foreach format (the foreachmat? I’ll see myself out) is dialogue-only, that meant that Cliff had to be talking to someone. Lum pointed out that having Cliff talking to himself would probably end up feeling a little forced and awkward, so I suggested we instead had him talk to the picture of his family. The first draft of this was indeed about him missing his son’s birthday, which we all posted a lot of crying emojis about in chat before deciding it was a little too cliche to keep in, but in the course of discussing it I threw out that Cliff might be collecting some kinds of souvenirs to bring to his kid when he got home. My initial suggestion was that he was making a friendship bracelet from the keycard lanyards, but that was going to be hard to communicate through the art, so Rhys jumped in with the idea of carving the red keycard from the last scene into a little dinosaur, which then got turned into a whole menagerie. Which turned the panel from one picture taped to the wall to something more akin a shrine to Cliff’s absent family, making his isolation all the more poignant.

Page 023 - Back Home

In the following dialogue with Cliff, Mercy says some half truths about her motivations and their situation:

Everything she says here is technically not a lie, but it takes on a dramatically different meaning once you know the twist that’s coming in the Last Gun world RE: the current status of planet Earth. It’s a sneaky misdirection, a little bit of careful wordplay from Mercy, so that Cliff doesn’t cotton on to the truth. How clever of her, to navigate this situation so carefully!

But, actually, why did she do that?

Like, is she a fucking fey? Does she subscribe to a Kantian view of morality? Why not just lie outright to Cliff here instead of doing this cheeky half-truth shit? She was willing to lie on page 18 when she gave him that “All of Earth is counting on you, Mason” line. What gives??

In an earlier draft of this page she really did just straight up lie: 

She’s referring to her family in the present tense here when she knows full well they’re stardust by this point. Nothing wrong with that, and yet– doesn’t it feel kind of like a cheat? It actively feels disingenuous to have her open up like this and for it all to turn out to have been bullshit. 

But it's interesting, because Mercy lying constantly to Cliff is a major plot point! It's not a case where it wouldn't make sense for her to use that phrasing here, because she's actively trying to deceive Cliff. What she says on page 18 is also a blatant fabrication, but for some reason that feels okay where this feels almost like when a critical clue is kept from the reader in a detective novel. 

The difference, I think, is in the framing. This is framed as a moment of vulnerability for Mercy, where we get to see past the facade a little, get some insight into her character. But if that insight turns out to contain outright mistruths, it kind of undoes the whole thing-- the audience can't trust anything Mercy ever revealed about herself, so all the character building we've done before the big reveal essentially becomes moot. While it's not a plot hole or anything -- it's totally realistic for her to lie about this! -- it's still unsatisfying, because it means we're giving the audience character insight that basically gets undone later. But then, this issue doesn't apply so much to the throwaway lines about protocol and whatnot that come earlier, because those clearly aren't giving us insight into Mercy -- all that stuff is already a mask that the audience is primed to distrust.

Peri provides:

Big agree with everything Lum says on this point. The only thing I’ll add is that the line about Mercy’s granddaughter led to a surprising amount of discussion before we cut it. It’s a tiny detail, but one that humanizes Mercy–and it’s not clear we want to humanize Mercy, at least not in that way. It makes Mercy more similar to Cliff (i.e. that she also has a family she misses) at a time when we want to be contrasting her with Cliff, because we want him to feel alienated and alone enough to pick up that gaming console for comfort. Additionally, Mercy is supposed to serve as a reflection of Nix, who has no meaningful relationships whatsoever. 

On that topic, Mercy’s line about “Every ounce we bleed [...] No matter how many times they cut us down. We keep moving.” is another one of those dialogue callbacks I mentioned a few pages ago. Only Mercy’s lines have to call back to Nix, who doesn’t speak in this chapter. So we had to get a little creative with it.

Oh! And there was one on the last page, too! That line where Cliff says “Hey, little man”... Hmm, I wonder what other green character from earlier this chapter talks like this? ;D

The big twist happens on this page, final page of the chapter. It’s a loop! Well, not so much a twist as it is the basic premise of the comic. That’s what this first chapter is, really, it’s the most effective way I could think of to explain what the premise of Foreach is. We needed 23 pages to get across what’s happening, what it means, and why you should care. 

I expected a fair number of readers would see this twist coming, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Figuring out where a story is going ahead of time can be very rewarding! You feel validated for spotting the threads and putting it all together. There’s few feelings sweeter than jumping at your screen shouting “I knew it!”. The problem is when the reader doesn’t feel smart for figuring it out– when it seems obvious, when they’ve seen it a million times before– that’s when you lose them.

A point of inspiration for me was The World’s End, a movie. In that one (moderate spoilers) there’s a character who is secretly a robot. But rather than tell you that outright, they just gradually make it more and more obvious as you watch, making it all but inevitable that you realise what’s going on before the heroes do– and once it hits you, that’s when the tension starts building! When are they going to figure it out?? The eventual reveal scene ends up being a release of that tension rather than a left-field shock.

So I played a similar hand here. By this point in the comic we’ve already seen the character plays a game pattern play out 3 times, so when we open on Cliff Mason we’re already expecting that he’ll do the same thing. Canny readers will have noticed by now that the game each character plays reflects the desires they have in life, so it stands to reason they might be trying to predict, by now, what kind of game Cliff might sit down and play after a hard day’s shooting guys. And if we follow his character… his ideal game sure sounds an awful lot like Jasper’s world, doesn’t it?

That game, revealed here, is titled “Home Bound”. It wasn’t always gonna be called that, though! If you take a look at the site code, you’ll find Home Bound elements are labelled as “Hometown”. Earlier than that I was gonna go with “Home World” before remembering that’s already a popular game series. T’was Rhys who suggested the current title (for real this time, I’m not misattributing Peri again). I was reluctant to accept it at first because it sounds like Homestuck crossed with Earthbound and I was at this time still attempting to futilely beat the Homestuck allegations, but in the end I just couldn’t resist that delightfully grim double meaning.

Peri pledges:

I want to take a moment to talk about the moment where we transition back to Homebound. The moment between when Cliff boots up the console and when Jasper opens their eyes, when we’re floating in the dark space between worlds…

It is one of my favorite moments in the whole comic, and probably the contribution to this first chapter that I’m most proud of. It came about because I wanted to add a panel of Jasper’s closed eyes to reinforce the sense of jerking awake as the game boots up, but Lum wanted to keep the pace of the page nice and snappy. So I was like, hey, what if we put the closed eye panel between the two page backgrounds…

I absolutely love the effect it creates. I love the shape language of Jasper’s eyes and glasses–distinctive enough to tell what they are, but abstract enough that it takes you a moment to connect all the dots. I also like using this as the first “world breaking” moment in the comic, which simultaneously closes the loop and cements the conceit of the backgrounds visually representing the worlds (and that fucking with the background means fucking with the worlds!) The whole sequence hits like a truck! An amazing end to an amazing first chapter.