*CozMcSkwirl

Yo guys,

If you follow my sketchblog at [link] you'll see this post but with some cool art and side-by-side comparison of the recent work on the Battlegate prologue.

At SquirrelWorks, our general rule has been "what's done is done." That means, any art we create won't be revisited in the future because of enhancements to our style.

This rule is in place for a few reasons. First, as artists, we always improve - there's always new things to learn, you can always grow. If we were to revisit every drawing we did each time we became better, we'd never advance our stories. The second reason is to help enforce the first. Art should also serve as a milestone - something you can look back at to compare and see how much you've improved over the years and how much you can still grow.

So this means, when I've posted a page to one of my comics, the art will generally be safe from change. However, the rule doesn't apply to story or dialogue editing - this happens on occassion to help clean things up. Since pages are posted one-at-a-time, it can be easy to let the words get messy.

In the 6 years I've been making web comics, this is the first time I break this rule - but for good reason, I feel. I've been recently going back over the last 2 chapters of Battlegate and doing minor text editing and fixing speech bubbles.

While cleaning this up a bit, I kept going back to the Prologue of Battlegate completely unsatisfied - I just didn't feel that I was getting across my point. When I first did the series, I was just learning to draw in that style, and I was still heavily influenced by my cartoon work on Coz/Effect, so, the drawings would sometimes come out too "cartoony."

The prologue is supposed to be very serious, sad and mysterious - and while the text took care of this, I didn't feel the art really conveyed what I wanted in retrospect. Hugo just didn't look right - in fact, he looked really goofy.

So, I broke the sacred rule - just this once - for the sake of story and worked hard to match the colors to the first pages to keep as much artistic continuity as possible.

Anyways - you can click here: [link] to jump straight to the newly-posted pages or you can click here: [link] to see the art and side-by-side comparisons.

And, for Hugo's fan girls (and boys >_> ) consider his near-lack-of clothes fan service.

I'll post the final pages here probably.

laterz,

Chris