2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

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The Comment Golem
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2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

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Discussion thread for [CT] Dispel!
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Imp-Chan
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Re: 2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

Post by Imp-Chan »

You know, I was ridiculously proud of wrangling all that disclaimer text onto this page... but now that I see it this tiny, I realize it's a little tough to read that way. Hopefully it'll be fine in print (which is larger and much higher resolution), but if it doesn't show up well in the proof I'll have to go back and change it.

-_-'
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lyze
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Re: 2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

Post by lyze »

So throughout the series Meji constantly insults Sarine's appearance. Is this just all pure jealousy? Sometimes I wonder like how in today's she refers to Sarine as 'mannish'. Was Sarine suppose to look a lot more rugged looking than she comes out in the comic? I can kind of see it that with all the traveling and that she works in a physically demanding career and with elves just being tall in general.
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Re: 2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

Post by 5Cats »

Getting blasted by a "Dispel" when there's nothing there TO BE dispelled cannot be a pleasant experience... :lol:

Mental Picture: Sarine in a chainmail bikini... I'll be in my bunk...
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Re: 2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

Post by Graybeard »

Imp-Chan wrote:You know, I was ridiculously proud of wrangling all that disclaimer text onto this page... but now that I see it this tiny, I realize it's a little tough to read that way. Hopefully it'll be fine in print (which is larger and much higher resolution), but if it doesn't show up well in the proof I'll have to go back and change it.
More than "a little tough to read," I fear; it's durn near illegible. The combination of screen resolution and extreme forward pitch on the font makes all the letters run together and look alike. I think you're right, it'll be better on the printed page, if it comes closer to filling the speech bubbles. The question is whether the improvement will be enough.

This actually raises a thing I'd been meaning to ask you about, Impy. (BTW, about half way through the Volume 5 transcription, which has been slooooow -- lots of very wordy strips there, which was great for story development but slow to transcribe.) How are the speech bubbles sized? Is it with some auto-sizing gadget, or artist's eye, or what? In the electronic version, the large, spacious speech bubbles of the new version of the comic block some bodacious art and are not anywhere close to full, but presumably that too will be different in the print version. If there is auto-sizing at work, there might be some knob -- I'm not familiar with your software to know for sure -- that allows resizing automatically to fit the text. Or there might not.
lyze wrote:So throughout the series Meji constantly insults Sarine's appearance. Is this just all pure jealousy? Sometimes I wonder like how in today's she refers to Sarine as 'mannish'. Was Sarine suppose to look a lot more rugged looking than she comes out in the comic? I can kind of see it that with all the traveling and that she works in a physically demanding career and with elves just being tall in general.
Pure jealousy, I think. In this episode she really hasn't gotten a chance yet to see what Sarine really looks like. She just pre-emptively assumes the worst, which as the notes on the page point out, is a pragmatic way to go. Later, when she objects to the way Sarine disguised herself to get back into the bar after the fight with Melrin, it's more that she's complaining about Sarine overdoing it -- never mind the fanservice. :lol:
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Re: 2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

Post by Imp-Chan »

The bubbles are sized by eye, and are spacious because when you put the text tight to the edge of the bubble, it's harder to read. Since there's a lot more text on the average page of Errant Story than there is on the average page of modern comics, making it easier to read seemed the better part of valor. Generally speaking, the bubbles actually block very little of the art, I'm pretty careful to avoid it as much as possible (much more careful than Poe ever was, as he keeps telling me over and over when I gripe about not being able to avoid something), but you do want them to block some of it because otherwise they don't integrate into the page.

It occured to me that today's page was one that I lettered earlier on, so the bubbles weren't as fiddled with as they are in strips I lettered later, and the shape may have been contributing to the sense that the bubbles didn't fit the text. For a while there, I didn't know how to change the shape of the bubbles, so they were all made out of the standard ellipse shape in Photoshop, which is actually not very good for this. I just went back and fiddled with it a bit... hit refresh and try it now.

^-^'
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Anthony
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Re: 2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

Post by Anthony »

Still sort of unreadable. Doing horizontal compression doesn't produce terribly legible text, it might work better to just reduce the font size and fit more lines in each text box.
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Re: 2013-09-19: [CT] Dispel!

Post by Graybeard »

"Sort of" unreadable, rather than "almost completely" unreadable. This lettering is a definite improvement, and I think it'll be just fine in printed form.

On doing some browsing, I actually find very few cases where the new speech bubbles obscure art that was visible in the original. You're right about that. There are a few, but nothing major. I think most of the cases where I notice the size of the bubble are in episodes where there is new art, ironically; there's nothing for the bubbles to overlap in those cases, because they were drawn later, and in harmony with the format that's going to be used in the book. It still seems like a lot of white space. Presumably background shading as it goes into the proof stage will take care of that.
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