One of my favorite parts about the writing of Howl's Moving Castle is how easy it is to write off all the things from our world at first as him just being a weird wizard™ (also thanks to bestie @jutenium for spotting this I wouldn't put it like that without you!!/pos). Sure, Sophie uses weird descriptions, but readers have every reason to believe them because of the way Howl is presented as a character. When Sophie says he wrote with a quill that doesn't need an ink, you wouldn't think it was actually a ballpoint pen, you would think Howl had just enchanted his quill so that it wouldn't need ink! When she adds that she can't make out a single word, you think he has matchingly terrible handwriting, but in fact Sophie has simply never seen a pen writing. When she sees the mysterious labels on his books, you think he's keeping a lot of obscure magical literature, but it's really just an encyclopedia and a guide like "Top 10 Rugby Tips." When Sophie notices the bottles in Howl's bathtub, you think they're some kind of magical jars where he keeps girl's hearts, but I'm almost certain that they're just 'Dove' and 'Head and Shoulders' that he's enhanced with his spells and put silly labels on. When you read Calicifer singing a song in a language Sophie doesn't understand, you think it's some kind of ancient cipher or code, but it's actually just a rugby song in Welsh that Howl sings when he's drunk. And finally, when you see the terrifying black door, which is completely shrouded in darkness, you imagine a passage to an eerie, mythical place, similar to what Miyazaki showed us - but it's just fucking Wales.
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This is one of my favorite minor details in Dungeon Meshi, firstly because what in the femme fatale, but also because it's one of those little things that raises so many questions about worldbuilding.
The Occam's Razor defense attorney in me says that Ryoko Kui gave Kabru a boot knife because she wanted him to escape from his bonds here. And Kabru is a very competent swordsman, why wouldn't he have a boot knife, sure. He's already got a dagger, he can have this too.
And yet: the implications. Kabru, why do you have that? That is not remotely something that could be easily accessed or used in combat. Nobody is pulling out a pen knife from the heel of their boot during a fight with a monster. It's useless in the dungeon ... unless you're the type of person who isn't just worried about monsters.
I've mentioned this before, but I consider one of Kabru's functions in the narrative as being the character who fully brings the idea of human ecosystems into the story. There's a reason why he's always connected to large groups of people (Toshiro's party, the Canaries). He (along with Mr. Tansu, briefly) introduces the reader to the social and political forces working on the dungeon, showing us that none of this is happening in a monster-filled vacuum. His confrontation with the corpse retrievers, who very nearly kill Kabru's party permanently with their reckless murder-for-money scheme, reminds us that monsters are not the only things that prey on humans. Kabru understands the ways the dungeon causes people to put profit over human lives.
We only get hints of it in the story, but like any gold-rush-style economic boom, it's implied that there is a lot of crime and corruption surrounding the dungeon.
So yeah, it really makes me wonder why Kabru keeps a tiny knife in his boot, meant to be carried on him even in situations where he would otherwise be unarmed. Stored exactly in the place where it's easy to reach, even if, for some reason, your hands are tied behind your back.
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How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist
Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.
Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!
This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)
So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.
I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.
I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.
Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.
Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!
This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.
But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)
I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.
My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!
Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!
panels that look like this in scroll format...
can look like this in print!
because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.
Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!
Enjoy!
Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!
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