Book One, page 63

bravo1102 on Aug. 23, 2017

Yes indeed, Halfdan really is that thick-headed when it comes to women. Searsha's thought balloon is supposed to show the jumble of thoughts she has on the subject. And maybe her thoughts are overwhelming her? (That's why they seem to be crowding her out of the panel)

Halfdan is that big lug of a guy that she got sweet despite her better judgement. She isn't mad at Aleeka as much as she is at herself. And she's taking it out on Aleeka.

It helps understand Halfdan's character if you imagine him as Arnold Schwarzenegger. The figure is in fact an Arnold figure with blonde hair and a beard.

I should apologize for this comic being so talky and slow rather than fast paced and full of action. But I got into the characters and they wanted their stories told as opposed to just another epic fantasy. I wanted to do something more about the people than the events.

And remember Halfdan saying Aleeka was more mild because she was from the East? Wrong. She does have a bite. But taking it to Searsha? Searsha may just a little intimidating.


The figures were all photographed sitting around the fire. I really hadn't gotten the hang of compositing when I did this scene. In fact the photos here weren't even taken against a neutral background and had to painstakingly edited using the pen tool in Photoshop.

Halfdan is supposed to be shrugging in that last panel. It was something that the figure could do with his shoulder joints and I wanted to try it out.

This scene would be the last one done this way and in fact was the last one before I picked up a copy of Comic Book creator. However, my version no longer works as I've gone through too many computers since then and the serial number is no longer valid. Without a valid serial number you can't convert the images to jpegs. But I am more than capable of redoing all the CB creator pages in Photoshop. It was a learning tool to help me understand paneling and page layout. I really liked the balloon and the text layout features but I'm way past investing in a new version.

And I hated having to set up new folders for the images to show up in the pages, and not being able to edit any of the folders or images without screwing up the whole page. Now I can just drop in new layers as needed. In fact this page had two versions of the bottom two panels. The framing of the characters wasn't quite right so I went back and resized the elements and moved them around until I got a panel that matched the page layout.