Commentary Pages 15-16

Page 015 - No Hope

The games that Hellfuck is based on, really hard platformers, don’t really have a unified visual aesthetic I can draw from. Contrast to High Fantasy, or Pulpy Sci-Fi, which are very well-established aesthetics to dip into, but how might you describe the visual genre of Super Meat Boy? I Wanna Be The Guy? Kaizo Mario Romhacks? I feel like they have a very mercenary approach to their aesthetics, where they do whatever works. Many of them are one step removed from programmer art in the degree to which they prioritise gameplay expediency over art direction. There are individual games in the masocore platformer genre that are capable of looking really nice. Celeste, or yeah, even Super Meat Boy have really nice visuals. But Masocore Platformer doesn’t bring to mind a visual theme the way RPG or FPS do, you know?

In the earliest stages of ideating Foreach, I considered leaning into this. Hellfuck is meant to feel like nonsense, after all, a death labyrinth that exists for no other reason than to inflict suffering onto its inhabitants. Maybe it makes sense to make such a setting totally substanceless, then, just brickwork and spikes and a singular hateful figure in the centre.

But that’s a little unsatisfying, isn’t it? I want these settings to look interesting, both for the sake of the reader AND myself so I don’t get bored. Hellfuck should seem like an interesting game, and not having any kind of unifying aesthetic beneath it all makes the whole thing feel kind of anemic. And if I wanted more characters in there, I’d need some kind of visual explanation for what they are and what role they serve.

These problems were all solved, of course, by Rhys. Praise him. Praise him now! “Angels in Hell” is such a solid concept for the ethos of this game, a world where no amount of virtue will save you from suffering, expressed in a way that is impressively on the nose. From there the cathedrals thing is just an obvious pick to tie in with all the existing religious symbology. It just works!

From there, the question is raised of what role NPCs even serve in this world. Masocore platformers are not exactly known for their ensemble casts; they are not well suited to boss fights nor helpful allies, their design tends to be so focused on traversal that any additions that new characters might bring would add bloat to a genre that favours elegance.

So with this in mind, what role do the other angels serve in Hellfuck? 

What else? Set dressing. You didn’t think they were going to help, did you?

Here we have what Rhys would call the Angel of Sacrifice, so named because progressing through the game requires their Sacrifice, squishing their head with the door. Also for other reasons. They may or may not have some significance later in the story. We’ll see, won't we~?

This was the first “major angel” I designed besides that one guy who’s going to show up next page. I like to think of this design as an introductory angel, yanno? They’re the most traditional interpretation of a bound angel, with such flourishes as a broken halo and bound wings to let you know what to expect here. Later angel designs will get more abstract, but I think it’s important for this first one to be pretty standard so you can interpret it easily enough.

We wanted to have Nix interact with another angel here. The original version of this scene would have had an angel express some positive sentiment toward Nix, and then she would take a step forward, and the Angel would be violently torn apart by spikes and shredders to reveal a key bound up in their heart To really hammer home how cruel this world is, like it dangles the possibility of a positive relationship toward nix before cruelly snatching it away.. I didn’t do this, mostly because it would have been a huge pain to draw, but also I think maybe because I wanted Nix to be a little more of an active participant rather than a passive observer here. Nix still isn’t talking, but we get a little more of a sense of her personality anyway with how she interacts with the other characters in this setting. 

I had another goal with this page. I wanted to kill Nix.

Hellfuck is a hostile place. It kills Nix often and without reprieve. While this has been well established on the previous two pages, I didn’t want it to be something the audience might forget. Clearing the previous area did not lead to the danger subsiding, the rest of this world still wants her dead. This presents a pacing challenge, because I don’t want to feel like I’m belabouring the point. Nix dying is inherently inconsequential, she is functionally immortal, no wound she sustains lasts more than the space between two panels. Inserting another Nix death into the comic is difficult to do without wasting the reader’s time! 

Fortunately, comedy comes to the rescue once again. We kill Nix in the form of setup and payoff, and now it suddenly does serve a purpose! Nix dies, the page has a solid ending to wrap up what “narrative arc” is here, and we get one of the funnier gags in this sequence. Comedy is a damn versatile tool: remember that!

Peri Says:

This is the first page where we get to zoom out and see a bit more of the landscape of Hellfuck! Take in the scenic sights… such as all the impaled immortal angels suffering eternal torment. Delightful!

The tortured-angels-as-set-dressing is a key part of the vibe™ of Hellfuck. This is a world where lying down and giving up is the correct thing to do. Literally every angel trapped here other than Nix has succumbed to their fate, and the fact that she hasn’t is our first indication of just how much of a little freak she is. To that point, her total indifference to the Angel of Sacrifice’s words and wellbeing drives it home even further. (And I adore how scrungly her expression is while she does it. She’s all teeth and rage!)

But going back to the background angels, that’s actually something we actually wanted to have even more of in the comic–ideally, there would be flayed angels out on display on just about every Hellfuck page–but time and art constraints frequently make it not a worthwhile tradeoff. Ah well! Hopefully including them in key panels every now and then gets the point across adequately.

This is also the first page with angel speech on it! Like most of the comic formatting, there was a fair bit of back and forth to get to the final look of it. I remember Lum saying that they originally had wanted to handwrite all the angel speech, but it ended up being too time consuming. I really like the look we landed on–the free floating text gives it an ethereal quality, almost as if you can hear their words echoing off the hallowed walls of the dungeons. And it’s also notable that this is the only dialogue format that does not attach a character name to the lines being spoken. Which means we don’t have to specify names for any of the characters we meet in this sequence–which is perfect, because none of the angels in this world are supposed to have names at all. It’s a deft trick that I quite enjoy, since the reader may not even notice the lack of names at this point of the story, but it lets us point it out as an important detail in later chapters as we learn more about the “lore” (or lack thereof) of Hellfuck and as the little angel’s story progresses!

Page 016 - The Bastard

Speaking of that one guy who’s going to show up next page…

This angel, who we shall call the Bastard, went through a lot of visual iteration, but the important parts came from Rhys. We’ve got a lot of angels in this hell down here, it only makes sense to have a fallen here among them as top dog.

The bastard’s stringy hair falls across his face in three strips, kind of like a cage, kind of like Jiro’s haircut. He’s emaciated, almost mummified, but his wings still fly wide for that juicy intimidation factor. And instead of legs he’s got a long, serpentine tail. His design is optimised for expression – legs and knees and all that bullshit only get in the way of looming, cut ‘em entirely, he doesn’t crawl so much as slither. But his great big hands still let him gesture, still let him drag himself across the stones, still let him fucking GET you.

I always liked how he looked here, in this first panel I drew him. Looming over. He looks freakish. I’ve often tried to replicate this look in later panels, but, much as I love the more monstrous face he has here, it goes against that goal of his design– he needs to be expressive.

The bastard is basically a physical embodiment of spite, rage, and self-loathing. He needs to look monstrous, yes, but he still needs to be human enough that that emotion shows through. You need to look at this guy’s head and go, christ. This bloke is livid.

His face was something I spent a while trying to get right. Too expressive and he didn’t feel freaky enough, too monstrous and you wouldn’t read the emotion on him. The final design, though, I’m very happy with. His face is wrinkled with a thousand of those little lines that show up when you contort your face into a frown, the kind I draw on everyone’s face when they’re mad, just ratcheted up. He’s got rows upon rows of razor–sharp teeth, and those two tiny pinprick white eyes that pop out from his darkened face. His whole face is optimised toward a specific range of expressions, all variations on really fuckin mad.

“The Bastard” is not a name that this character is ever referred to as in the comic or ever will be. It’s kind of our internal name for the character, I think it’s leaked out into the Foreach discord by this point. I’m sure there’s pockets of readers out there who have even more creative names for the guy I’ve never heard of. 

There was a time when the character would have had a more feminine design, like a stringy haired harpy, and would have been named “the Bitch”. I still kinda miss that name. It’s such an ugly word, fits so well within the yelping hatred that Hellfuck carries, so informal, so rude. When we changed Jiro’s character to be more masculine, the name necessarily had to change too because calling a man “the Bitch” has a very different connotation. And, unfortunately, there’s just… not a masculine equivalent to “Bitch” that hits quite as hard! The Bastard is what we ended up on as the closest we got. It still fits the character, I think, but in a different way. Lines up more with the cathedrals and the angels and the grandeur of Hellfuck, and less with the UI prompt that says “FUCK YOU” when you die.

Peri Says:

IT’S HIM. This fuckin’ guy, amiright? What a bastard. What a god-damned Bastard.

The Bastard can be a challenging character to write. He’s the embodiment of a certain kind of self-loathing, of the feeling that you deserve whatever bad is coming to you so much that you start to manifest those very things into reality. It’s an awful, debilitating way to feel, and if you’ve ever been in that headspace–man, I’m so sorry. I’ve been there too, and I’m sending you all the hugs.

But here’s the thing–that kind of depression and self sabotage can be struggled against. And in this comic, it will be. And as a result, the Bastard is destined to take a lot of Ls later in the story. Pretty much as soon as he starts meeting characters that have the means to fight back against him, they do. Even by the time of this posting (with Chapter 3 just wrapped up), he’s already started taking some of those Ls–and the fact that he is immortal means that they can beat him again and again and he will always live to lose another day.

Which is all to say that in his introduction, he needed to come out swinging. We needed to establish that he is one scary motherfucker, because it’s all downhill for him after this. I think this page does that fantastically, mostly thanks to the art. The elements all come together so nicely: the enormous size contrast between him and Nix, the way his design is all hard angles and anger, the way she takes one look at him and immediately turns and flees. The panel of his shadow swallowing her on the ground is one of my favorites. He feels like an unstoppable force, like something that cannot be fought or overcome, only fled from, and even then only temporarily because he will catch you. If life in Hellfuck feels like being trapped in the pits of your depression, and he is that mean voice in your own head that berates you and pulls you back down anytime you start trying to claw your way out of it.

What a Bastard.