As countless bands, writers, and filmmakers have discovered since the debut of the search engine: give your thing a distinctive name!
Anyway. I started this without being sure how much annotation I’d be able to pull off…and now every page in chapter 1 has 2+ paragraphs of notes. Guess I’ll keep it up.
For someone who “didn’t want a Master” like four pages ago, Patrick switched back into “how come I can’t call you Master” awfully quickly, huh.
First time I had zero luck finding an accent image that complemented this page. So instead, here’s one about the experience of drawing them. (Except in my case it’s not a drawer, it’s multiple cups reserved for pen-holding.)
Bianca, I know you’re not exactly rolling in spare cash for turns-out-to-be-unnecessary purchases, but you could buy Patrick a doggie bed. On the grounds of It Would Be Super Cute.
I can’t decide if the Master-Sparrow scenario here would go worse (because she’d still be put-off and wary around Patrick), or better (because she’d just go ahead and pet him, and it would be immediately obvious that he liked it).
The super-subtle wood texture is another detail that was in the original art, on the same layer, so I didn’t fight with it to make Patrick cast a shadow.
Finally, some attention put into the product design! The cereal is “what if Lucky Charms, but the mascot is an anime tie-in.”
I mostly did the “avoid copyright claims by not putting logos on anything” strategy. Kinda wish I’d done more of the “slightly alternate-universe brands” approach.
In the pre-remaster version of this page, it had almost no shading — which is passable for the average scene, but really diminished the impact of “something dramatic and glow-y is going down.”
…and in the RE-remaster of this page (compare the pre-annotation version), I made it even darker. And greener. And added shading to Bianca’s blanket and shorts. (They didn’t get shaded already because the patterns were in the original — and at this point in 2011, I wasn’t even putting patterns on separate layers. Which is wild to think about now.)
I originally queued these annotated posts with the trade-paperback versions of the pages. Now I’m going back and replacing them with the final Master’s Edition versions. So if you see any references to “things I would change if I was going to” in future annotations…eh, I’m not aspiring to be perfect about editing those.
Establishing some more of the Being injury/transformation rules.
You have to wonder how much of Bianca’s speech here is actually sinking in for Patrick, and how much is immediately getting beached on the shore of “that’s not how this works.”
Without the context of…well, the whole
rest of Being lore…”I don’t want another Master” is exactly what you expect a character in Patrick’s position to say.
I thought about tweaking this dialogue during the remastering. Eventually decided, you know what, let people come back on a reread and be struck by what a massive, unprecedented disruption this is.
“What if Sparrow decided to go ahead put herself on Patrick’s Contract” would be a heck of a canon-divergence side story.
(There’s a summarized version elsewhere in the archive. And in the Master’s Edition.)
But she is self-aware about her…uh, let’s not say “flaws,” because they could just as easily be advantages in the right situation…her personality traits that aren’t really suited to having this kind of authority over a Being.
Bianca, trying so hard to reach out and be supportive: naming yourself is a big significant step in personhood and self-determination!
Patrick, confused: the same one I’ve been called for the past couple decades is fine I guess
(Pretty sure it’s still inscribed that way in his Contract, not to be overwritten until Bianca makes the next one.)
Technically the first page where Cohen appears. He and Patrick both had “decoy” character tags for a while — “Spot” and “Patrick’s former master” — until their real names came into play.
And yet another “poor Patrick” page. He needs a serious hug.
