Emerald City Struggle

in which our hero fights with Daz Studio, Photoshop, and his inner demons to create a landscape shot

Dear Readers,

For the past several days, the Emerald City has been trying to kill me. Yes, that Emerald City—the one from Oz. It’s in the public domain, which means a version of it is in my comic, but the trick with using anything in the public domain is to make sure that you’re not borrowing from any adaptations of the original work that are not in the public domain.

So, for instance, I can freely use Dorothy’s silver shoes from L. Frank Baum’s original novel (just as they do in Wicked), but I am not allowed to use the ruby slippers made popular by the 1939 MGM musical.

That plus inexperience in creating cityscape establishing shots has been a source of constant frustration in the making of The Blood of Seven Queens. Longtime readers may remember I ran into a similar situation with the Prologue issue I put out in November 2023. In that case, I replaced the scripted shot of the city skyline with a more close-up shot of a particular neighborhood. This time, with issue one, that wasn’t going to cut it.

For one thing, there was another panel that was going to be a close-up shot of a neighborhood—the one right after this one. For another thing, I knew I had to get over my fear of creating city skyline shots at some point. But what that meant in practice was that I haven’t showered in three days and everything on my to-do list that was not this one shot went out the window.

Am I happy with it? Yes. I think it came out awesome. But do I think the next one of these I do will be any easier? I’m not sure.

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Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if there wasn’t a challenge like that on every one of the four pages I produced this week.

The first page was all about figuring out what the Big Bad Wolf’s dialogue was going to look like (as Writer Chris had decided the Wolf is supposedly putting on a kind of Batman voice like Christian Bale does in The Dark Knight). The second page involved my first proper action scene of the book, with Frieda dodging swipes from the Wolf until he finally catches her with a determined thwack! And the third page, the last before the aforementioned Emerald City Struggle, involved Frieda striking back with a magical attack—another first.

I’d like to say that, with these four pages behind me, the rest will be smooth sailing. I’d like to say that, but I don’t want to jinx myself. And so, I’ll just say I’m happy with the work that I did this week and I’m hopeful that each week will get a little bit easier—or at least a little bit more predictable in its pain points.

Paid supporters, keep on scrolling for your look at pages 13–16. Free subscribers, I’ll see you back here in a week!

Yours,
Chris