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Some words about 'Concealed Gunnads'
🕑 Added 2022-09-05 21:30:34 +0000 UTCJust to be clear, lots of SPOILERS AHEAD.
So if you haven't read this one, go check it out first and then come back here later.
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Oof!
This will be a long one...
Over the last few months I've shared a lot about how challenging it was to getting this comic completed. Improbable as it was, every single person involved had to, at some point, deal with personal problems. From mental health issues to even a fatality in our team of collaborators, we finally managed to have it released yesterday.
And to think that the first outline for this story was written in October, 2021... almost a year ago.
But today I'd like to share some other aspects of it.
Writing stories with 4th-wall breaking powers like Deadpool, Gwenpool or She-Hulk is always fun, but it's also tricky as fuck. I mean, the possibilities are absolutely endless, so the hardest part is to know when to stop introducing meta-narrative jokes, otherwise the actual story starts getting compromised.
And boy, was this a convoluted plot.
Idea started when Lety pitched me doing a story about "Invisible Touch", a Sue/Wade team-up digital comic published by Marvel for their Infinity Comics line.
(If you're not familiar with that, the Infinity Comics are weekly stories told in vertical format, exclusively available for their Marvel Unlimited app, designed to be read in phones and tablets.)
Invisible Touch is a fun story and I highly recommend that you check that out. But without giving much spoilers about it, it's a drawn-together-bantering-buddies kind of story that left this perfect opportunity for our spicy tale.
And we used as much reference as we could from it:
- We kept the personality dynamics that Sue and Wade showed in that story.
- The Bar-With-No-Name became the Nightclub-With-No-Name.
- The Sinister Syndicate are represented by their most visually interesting female members.
- The finger-gun trick we did more or less the same way the original comic does.
- The inciting incident is that something important was stolen from the Fantastic Four.
But there was this one idea that we wanted to reference, but couldn't:
We originally wanted Sue's presence to be revealed when the villainesses unexpectedly squirted their love juices in her direction, covering her with invisible figure with them. But unfortunately, we couldn't keep that in the end for page-space constraints. The comic already had 9 pages and Llama had already politely agreed to make the extra epilogue pro-bono, so we decided to have Sue reveal herself with an accidental orgsmic scream.
Speaking of invisibility, there are different theories on how that should work. Much like time-traveling ("closed-loop" or "multiverses"), invisibility-fetish enthusiasts are known to have vigorous disagreements about if inserted objects should be visible or not.
Some theorists say that an object inserted into an invisible body should be made invisible, but that would disrupt the narrative we created. The villainesses couldn't be fooled if Wade's manhood started disappearing when he and Sue went at it. So we decided early on in our process that we'd go with the alternative theory.
But there were some other things that did change during development.
For example, we wanted to have more Syndicate Villainesses and considered adding others Trapstr, Mary Typhoid and Queen Cat, among others. But that'd be too crazy and before scripting phase was over we had already decided to keep only Lorina, Elaine and Janice.
The vibrating chastity-belt device however, went trough a number of versions before we settled for the definitive one, which only happened in coloring phase.
Another significant change happened because in lettering I realized that page 8 wasn't quite working. And that's what made the comic have an additional two-day delay on top of all the previous ones.
Originally, page 08 ended with Sue's unintentional scream, and page 09 started with the villainesses directly reacting to that. But that seemed very odd and felt like something was missing in-between.
So I experimented a bit with reordering the panels of page 08 until I found something that I think could work. So I asked Llamaboy to do a small tweak to the art in the original first two panels of the page, turning them into the last panels of it.
He mirror flipped these panels, changed the facial expressions on the villainesses and added Wade's splooge inside Sue. In all modesty, I think it worked wonderfully and solved the problem completely.
Lastly, as with most meta-narrative stories we make, a lot of dialogue ideas appear during lettering stage. And one of my favorite parts of the dialogue in the story was the last idea that was included in the comic:
I am aware I have this tendency of having a bit (lots, actually) more dialogue in my stories than I probably should. It's probably because I try to condense as much as I can into the small quantity of pages I have the limited budget to produce. I think it's become such a recurrent thing that it's probably become a trait in my stories, at this point.
But in this case, despite the absurd amount of text (absurd even by my own average) I personally loved the various layers of this joke. Call me self-indulgent, I don't care, but come on... at the very least, it's an absolutely amusing, in-characters, lore-delving scene.
As an additional fun trivia fact, me and Lety got into this discussion about one word that didn't make it in the final version.
The M-word!
Seems that even though I think that is an extremely sexy word, there's a massive amount of people who feel the exact opposite about it, starting with my co-writer. It surprised me that a word I find so alluring can actually cause so much disgust and gross people all around the web.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/j24vhj/to_some_native_english_speakers_the_word_moist_is/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/64984/science-behind-why-people-hate-word-moist
So, in the end, instead of the m-word, we decided to go with something that's apparently less bothersome and sepsis made the punchline. Go figure...
...and that guys, was the story of how you got this comic today.
I hope you enjoyed reading it.
Feel free to use our Discord channel to ask more questions and share your thoughts on this comic (or any other comic of mine, while you're at it).
I'll try to do keep doing these not-so-little, behind-the-scenes thing more often, whenever I get a break from working on the comics themselves.
Now, onto the next release!
Late Hours Hornies, coming Sep 16th.
Talk soon!
-Tracy.
