Commentary: Pages 13-14

Page 013 - Bloody Hell

Here we’re introduced to Jiro’s game, Hellfuck. The title of this one is derived from a delightful little tumblr post about dark souls:

Despite the origin of the name, though, the Dark Souls influence on Hellfuck is mostly aesthetic. Both in the UI with the “you’re dead” prompts and all the majestic cathedrals and whatnot. In terms of the kind of game that it is, it’s more heavily influenced by masocore platformers like Super Meat Boy, I Wanna Be The Guy, the Kaizo Romhack scene, etc. 

I Wanna Be The Guy in particular has a gag that I think is instructive to the sense of humour of these kinds of games. Early on you’ll encounter giant cherries that, when you walk underneath them, fall down onto you and kill you. After retrying, you try to bait them out by stopping just short, letting them fall just in front of you, and then jumping over them… whereupon they fall back up and kill you. It would be dishonest to even describe Hellfuck as a “parody” of that – Hellfuck is the exact same joke as the kaizo trap, just in a non-interactive medium.

And a joke it is! At least it is here. I wanted to establish the little angel’s whole situation, here on this page, in an engaging way. Revealing this character who is trapped in an endless deathmurder dungeon doomed to endlessly repeat herself as she dies over and over really threatens to be a real relentless march of a sequence, which would threaten to jar with the tone of the rest of the comic. Foreach might get pretty dark but rarely for that sustained a period of time. My goal here is to engage a reader, and while suffering can be engaging it’s a kind of engagement that wears thin the longer you try to draw it out, eventually the reader will get numb to it. And there’s ways to make that work, mind you, but my own expertise as a writer is broadly biased toward comedy as my bread-and-butter, so that’s what I use to keep the audience’s attention.

Not to say I’m not taking it seriously at all. Hellfuck in general I think operates in that space where it’s a very sincere expression of where Jiro’s at, but it also is so sincere that it can be hard to take seriously. You can feel the hypothetical developer of Hellfuck trying to make you feel bad, and they’re trying so so hard, bless their heart.

This is expressed in the little-angel-who-will-later-be-known-as-Nix’s design:

An adorable little angel baby literally crying tears of blood. This design was a Rhys Original! She’s intended as, like, an overwrought symbol of lost innocence, painful in its high school notebook doodle clarity. There’s that one game, Ender Lilies, which he cited as not so much the inspiration for the design as it is a very clear expression of what she’s taking the piss out of. Look at this sad little girl! Isn’t it so so awful that this world is going to be sooo cruel to her?

So of course, when something bad happens to her, she dies in the most violent way possible to really tug at your heartstrings:

Splortch!

Nix exploding into blood whenever she dies serves three purposes:

• Super Meat Boy reference! It makes it clearer exactly what genre and type of game we’re referencing here. 

• It’s funny! Nix’s deaths are so over the top they wrap around into comedy. The contrast between going straight from adorable little angel into absurd fountain of blood makes the joke hit with more impact.

• Finally, and most importantly: Nix staining her environment with gore whenever she dies makes absolutely clear to the audience that her deaths are diegetic. Time isn’t being rewound or anything like that, Nix is physically reappearing a moment after she dies, and the remains at her last attempt staining the environment attest to this. This is important to establish early and with as much clarity as possible. The bloodstains I think got that across that unambiguously without any dialogue, which is generally what you want with exposition.

Peri’s Thoughts: 

Another wordless page! Well, unless you count the big YOU’RE DEAD - FUCK YOU at the end of the page, which in my opinion is perfect just as it is and in need of no editing whatsoever.

My contributions were fairly limited on this and the next page, especially since Lum had such a clear image of what they were going for from the start. I also remember this page coming together extremely quickly–which is particularly impressive since it has 10 panels, which was the highest number of any ForEach page at the time and even now sits at the upper end of the distribution. We knew going into this section that Hellfuck pages were going to need a higher panel count on average due to the lack of dialogue–both to keep the story moving at a reasonable pace and so that the pages would feel equally substantial to the ones that came before it. (It’s a perverse fact that drawing usually takes longer than writing, but looking at art takes far less time than reading dialogue. It was a reasonable concern that the silent Hellfuck pages would read much faster than the rest of the comic and feel less substantial as a result!) Fortunately, Lum came in with a game plan. First, the artstyle of Hellfuck (and particularly of Nix’s design) is noticeably simpler and looser than that of the other games, making it much faster to pose characters and finish panels without getting caught up on details. Second, specifically on this page, Lum was able to directly reuse the background of the opening panel multiple times–seven times on this page, in fact!

Back in the Old Days of webcomics, there was a real stigma against reusing art between panels (and I think there still is in some circles.) Readers in comment sections would call out reused backgrounds or character art as “lazy” or “shortcuts''. Which is insane, right? As far as storytelling formats go, outside of animation comics have among the highest rates art-need-per-unit-of-plot. And with webcomics in particular, often being multi-year endeavors, you really have to pace yourself. Using whatever time-saving techniques you have is just sensible–it’s the very essence of working smarter and not harder! Not all suffering for your art actually improves the final product. How much will readers notice if the lines in two similar panels are verrrrry slightly different because you redrew them? I’d argue it does not materially change the final reader experience, and thus the time is better saved and spent elsewhere. 

And on this page, I’d go even a step further and argue that reusing the art actually serves the page. Nix is literally resetting and playing the same screen of this level over and over again, so using the same art for each iteration enhances the sense of repetition and monotony.

One final thought: I’ll also add that we briefly considered adding blood stains to the second- and third-to-last panels on this page. It would make sense in universe and imply that Nix had experienced more deaths in between the ones we see on panel. Ultimately, it works better for the page to leave them off, since the final punchline with the flag wouldn’t have hit as hard without those two blood-free breather panels.

Page 014 - Again

I don’t like to have pages in the comic that don’t communicate any new information to the reader. No wasted time, we like to get to the point here in Foreachburg. This might raise the question: isn’t this page essentially just a repeat of the last one? What new information is being communicated here?

There’s a difference in tone, you’ll notice. The previous page is comedic, this one is serious, even if it’s covering the same basic ideas. And this one has more of an ending, the “Area Clear” provides a greater sense of resolution to the idea established in the first page. On page 13 we establish Nix dies over and over again, on page 14 we establish she can still make progress through sheer tenacity. Less concretely, though, is that while 13 establishes the mechanics of what’s happening to Nix, 14 shows us the emotional reality of that. What was played for a joke last page is now played straight, the emotional context is moved from you as an impartial observer to you as Nix, feeling her frustration and sharing in her triumph. Nix was not yet a character last page, she was a mere subject. But now we get the first glimmers of personality.

It’s no coincidence, then, that you first see one of her eyes on this page. Nix’s hair obscures her eyes most of the time, which tends to make her feel more emotionally inscrutable. Eyes do a lot of work in demonstrating emotion, after all, and so when they’re hidden a character has a much more limited range of emotion they can express. Nix’s hair acts as a mask of stoicism, and when that mask cracks a little we get to see one of her eyes peeking through, expressing the emotion that’s usually kept buried down. This all sounds symbolic but it really is as much of a practical thing, because I simply cannot communicate a certain intensity of emotion from Nix without showing one or both of her eyes. I tried here, but keeping her eyes hidden in the above panel just didn’t land at all. It didn’t feel any different to all the other little drawings I’d done of her in the past 2 pages. I needed this one to feel different. Like something had changed.

The real star of the show, though, is all these blood effects! Blood is so much fun to draw. Goopy and amorphous, but still greatly capable of communicating motion! And best of all, blood can never be off-model, unlike some complicated character designs I could name. All this blood is part of what I call a “really tall panel”. It’s a thing I do where I make a panel really tall. Every page I’ve done that has a really tall panel in it always ends up as one of my faves, because I feel they always end up as a solid expression of my strengths as an artist. You can get very inventive with the infinite canvas if you take the opportunities when they come. With this one particularly I really liked that sense of the page filling up with blood as you scroll down and the scale of what’s happening sinks in.

As the venerable Scott McCloud said: in comics, space is time. The perception of timing in a comic often depends on how the elements within the panels are spaced. As a webcomic this can be applied literally: consider how you experience the Really Tall Panel, where the actual viewport of your device gets redder as redder as you scroll through the page, as if the blood is physically splattering on the other side of the screen. The traversal of the space of the webpage translates directly into a progression of time! It’s a very powerful effect, and I use it whenever I feel I have a good opportunity (which is, as it turns out, not that often).

“Space is time” just as often applies to the spaces between panels, too:

Take a look at the end. The gap between panels 1 and 2 is super narrow. It’s a sudden shift! Likely to come up abruptly as you’re scrolling through the solid red. It feels a little jarring, we switch from the most overwhelming violence to sudden quiet. 

The gap between panels 2 and 3 is wider. We’re taking a moment, now, to breathe in what happened and where Nix is. It’s a more gradual transition, like a slow zoom out. It’s a transition between awareness of a single moment, to awareness of an entire context, as Nix decompresses from the trial she just endured now that she has a moment of calm.

Peri’s Thoughts: 

WE! LOVE! VERTICAL! SCROLL!

Okay, okay, I know it gets a bad rap sometimes because of Webtoons’ inexorable takeover of the online comic scene, but as a format? It’s so fun to play with for all the reasons Lum listed above and more. And one of the extremely fun things about ForEach’s format is that we can switch back and forth between vertical scroll and more traditionally sized panels at will, which gives us a whole new dramatic range of visual language to play with.

(Side note, if you want to read some insightful breakdowns that delve into what does and doesn’t work in a vertical scroll format, I highly recommend checking out the blog Learn from Webtoons on Tumblr! It’s no longer updating, but the archive is very worth perusing for anyone interested in the craft behind webcomics. You may even find a guest post from me on there ;D)

There’s other small details too. There’s no blood visible in panel 2, because the present moment is, for a time, free of any death or danger. Nix’s eye stops being visible in panel 3, as if she reasserts her mask of stoicism after letting it slip for just a second. I remember, when I was a younger artist, hearing other artists point out little techniques like this they applied to their work and feeling overwhelmed. How could I ever keep track of all that in my own work? But often these are things that are more felt than reasoned out. When I first drew panel 2, I tried putting some blood in it, but it felt wrong, somehow – it was only after considering why that was that I came up with the reasoning mentioned above. 

Peri Continues:

Another small change from the first draft of this page–the original text at the bottom was going to say “Checkpoint Reached”. Lum changed it to “Area Cleared” to avoid making any too-specific implications about how Nix’s respawning mechanic works. Incorporating the game mechanic aspects into ForEach is always a delicate balance, which I’m sure we’ll talk about more as we reach later chapters. On the one hand, they are extremely fun and one of the aspects that the readership seems to enjoy speculating on the most. On the other hand, when you start getting too specific with them it tends to open up a lot of hard to answer questions about how exactly these worlds work. As writers we risk boxing ourselves into set rules that will cause problems later on in the story, or even worse, it can break reader immersion entirely. We don’t want to put ourselves in a situation where readers are looking up every other page to ask “but what about [insert fiddly mechanic here]?” In general, we tend to err on the side of providing the general shape of how things work but leaving the specifics undefined so that the reader can make their own interpretations. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have an answer–Lum, Rhys, and I frequently end up on long tangent-filled phone calls discussing how these aspects work behind the scenes–but we tend to avoid putting expository word-of-god explanations into the script itself. This ranges all the way from small details (e.g. How far back does Nix respawn every time she dies? How is this decided when she’s in other games where “checkpoints” aren’t a thing?) to the enormous metaphysical questions (e.g. exactly how much control do each of the players exert over the actions of the protagonist in the game below them? What does that mean for free will in this universe?) 

(And don’t worry, this is an aspect I am SURE we will talk about more in the future! :D)

Let’s see, what else… Those little snappy bear traps with wings? Those things have a name! “Winged Biters”. Pretty descriptive, eh? Not that it’s important for the story, but now you know.