#cocokokoco

[zarla-s]

Just gonna do a quick one of these since I haven’t done one in a long time, my inbox got basically destroyed during the hacking incident back in February, haha. So I might have lost any other old questions any of you might have sent in...

Sans suspects more than Papyrus (this’ll come up in a bit actually) but as the two of them have gotten more settled into a normal life, he tries not to think about it very much. Papyrus talks about it openly more often, but Sans wants to believe that they can be normal and happy too, and thinking about their unanswered questions bothers him. I’m not sure experimentation would come to mind for them, since they were basically blank slates after Gaster fell, so they would’ve had to read or hear about the concept from someone else to consider it. Again Sans would be more likely since he’s more well-read than Papyrus, haha. It doesn’t help that no one really talks to them frankly about the plates, and now they always hide them so they have even less reason to think about them...

No one wanted you to do this, Gaster! It doesn’t solve anything! It’s true that Asgore+7 might not be an instant-win, but I tend to picture an End of Evangelion kind of scenario for Asgore+7 where he ascends to a kind of Godhood after absorbing countless souls so at that point humanity is screwed. But who knows!

I actually wrestled a lot with this question when I was working on the script for when Alphys first finds them. I wondered about whether or not the brothers would have even been taught the concept of gender, and whether or not they’d default to referring to everyone as a “he”, and whether or not they’d even be familiar with gender markers or be able to identify any of them with Alphys (if they were only taught skeleton gender markers - though why would they? there aren’t any other skeletons out there anyway - it’s entirely possible that they wouldn’t match up with lizard gender markers). For a while I considered them misgendering her as a “he” since that’d be all they would’ve known at that period... but the harder I thought about it, the more it seemed like an increasingly complex can of worms that had the potential to hurt people sensitive to pronoun/gender issues and confusing for a casual reader. And on a purely technical level it’d also be confusing, because the brothers also only refer to Gaster as “he”, so having TWO unknown “he”s that the brothers would be talking about without specifying which “he” was in question also seemed like it’d be confusing for the reader, and I wasn’t really sure how much it would add to the scene...

At the same time, the brothers automatically referring to her as a “she” also didn’t sit right with me... I couldn’t help but keep asking myself how they’d be able to tell. Eventually I settled on “them”. Gaster’s talked about people outside on occasion with them, and he always uses “them”, so I figured they picked it up from him. It was still a hard decision to make though...

He really doesn’t like it when it’s a monster he doesn’t know very well, he thinks it’s really rude. With people he’s really used to, like Asgore, it doesn’t bother him so much because he knows Asgore can still understand him easily that way, though he still doesn’t like it. With strangers or acquaintances though, it’s a lot harder for him and he’ll usually tell them to turn around and look at him rather than keep going, haha.

The power scale between humans and monsters is so extreme, I really don’t think absorbing a boss monster SOUL would affect a human at all, haha. It’s like... if a human SOUL could be considered at 100 power, absorbing a boss monster SOUL would put them at 101 or 105 or something. Which would be enough to cross a barrier that required a power level over 100, let’s say, but still wouldn’t be enough to really affect the human in any way. I do wonder how he’d react to a human with monster traits though... my first guess would be not kindly, haha.

Hmm... I wrote a post a while back about making an AU which has a bunch of advice that still broadly applies to any kind of longform story like a comic. The tl;dr being that you’ll want to work out your plot and your themes and your general goal ahead of time. Basically in terms of quick steps, I guess I’d go with something like...

Get a fun idea you want to explore

Work out the general plot of the idea, including the ending

Work out the general arcs your characters will have over the course of the story (where they begin, how they change, where they end)

Write some script drafts for each page or scene of your comic. You don’t have to draft the whole plot at once, just a handful of scripts at a time so you can get an idea of how each page/scene will flow into the next and the big picture view of the scene in general. I think I’m a bit unusual in this regard since every page in Handplates I do is usually a self-contained scene, and I think a lot of comics tend to spread out scenes much longer across multiple pages, but it really depends on how you want to do it. My scripts always tend to run long, and that can be really taxing when you’re starting out...

If you get an idea for a cool script way ahead in your timeline, write it down as soon as you get it. You can write scene scripts out of order if you want, you can always go back and edit them later as your story goes along.

Once you got a script done, you can start laying out the page. I did a post about my process for that here, and you can also watch the process via video here.

It helps if you have a backlog of pages to post when you first want to start! Otherwise you’ll want to keep to a fairly regular schedule, since that keeps you thinking about the story so you don’t lose interest. You can just jump in too though if you want.

Be prepared to sink an enormous amount of time and effort into the project. A comic is a reeeeally big timesink, depending on how complicated each page can be and how long your story is.

I don’t really know if I’m a typical comic creator or anything, haha. Writing is the most important aspect of the process to me, and for any longer or serious comic I always write the script and refine it many times before I actually start to draw it out. On the other hand, while I’m writing a comic script, I’m usually also picturing it visually in my head at the same time, so I consider panel set-ups, focus shots, locations, expressions... I’m a pretty audio-visual fantasizer, haha. I know that’s not everyone’s strong point though... everyone’s process is different!