I go back and forth on laser colors. I like the idea of the good guys and bad guys having different colored blasts coming from their guns, since it makes it easier to show who’s firing and see the crisscross of action. But it also feels a bit hokey and diagrammatic at the same time. Realistically, I also thought it would be cool to have different guns on the same side shoot different colors. After all, Roka, Cember, Ril, and Bennes all use different types of weapons, so it makes sense that they might not all look the same when fired. But then I thought a bunch of different colors would start to get confusing and also make any given scene look like a big Skittle war. So I fought the urge to “taste the rainbow” and stick to just two colors. Maybe that’ll change at some point though. I do like Skittles.

I can tell right now that Sky is going to be a tricky one to write for in her armored form. The idea is that she’s impervious to a good amount of harm in that form, but that also tends to diminish the threat of physical danger for her. So I felt the need to establish that, as of now, no one really knows the extent of her power or its limitations.

As I mentioned in a previous post, with Bocce, I wanted his snow outfit to be very similar in style to his regular clothing. So it sticks to the same black and white palette, with the three wraparound bands at the abdomen. I thought the alternating clasps was an interesting look to go with those three bands.

Bocce’s coat collar is a nod to Star Trek, specifically Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I love the uniform designs in that movie and really love the jackets/coats that Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik wear when investigating the space station Regula I. The collar here is directly inspired by the collars on those Regula I jackets.

For the most part, I try to portray characters realistically as far as gun holsters and belts go. Generally, when they’re lounging around the ship, they aren’t armed, since I figure a gun belt has to be a bit clunky to wear all the time. Only when they’re headed for a potentially dangerous situation do they get strapped up with weapons. So a lot of the scenes in The Big Snow Job don’t actually show Bocce fully decked out with his gun belt, as shown here.

I knew this firefight sequence would involve a lot of tight close-up panels over the next few pages, so I wanted to take the moment right up front to establish the spatial relationships between the characters. It always irks me a bit when that sort of thing isn’t set up properly since it usually then just becomes a confusing mess of action without a sense of grounding.

The other thing I really wanted to get across is the overwhelming firepower of the cattle rustlers. I wasn’t entirely sure the huge guns were going to read from the last page of the previous issue and that they were much more advanced guns than the simple rancher rifles the rustlers had earlier. So to drive that point home, I needed the art to show that Roka and company are very much out-gunned here.

For Roka’s snow outfit, I wanted to stick with his established style of elongated vertical shapes, so I gave him a long coat with vertical banding to accentuate the length. The pouches on his belt also have long flaps to continue the motif. I threw in the horizontal bands on the sleeves to break up the verticals a little and also because I just thought it might be an interesting look to have these slight bulges of fabric between each band on the arms.

When I did the first two Snow Job covers, the series was still supposed to come out in print as single issues. By the time I got to this cover for issue #3, I had fully committed to the webcomic (and direct-to-graphic-novel) route. So the concept of single issue covers didn’t really make sense. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I needed to do covers anymore, but ultimately, I decided that since I had already done them for the first two issues, I’d at least be consistent and do them for the remaining issues as well. I also figured for the graphic novel collection and the webcomic Series Index, it would be nice to have these covers as chapter break images.

Honestly, I have no idea what I’ll end up doing for the next story arc though. I go back and forth between whether I should keep doing covers/chapter images or not.

For the record, I do really like this cover, especially since it’s the first one where I didn’t feel the need to showcase the main characters or the ship. If I do keep doing these images, it’ll be nice to know that they aren’t being used as covers to sell single issues. As chapter break images inside a book, I might feel freer to experiment and do something that wouldn’t work as well for a cover meant to catch your eye on a crowded comic store shelf.

This was a tough decision, but ultimately, I decided that for a webcomic, consistency in schedule would be crucial to keeping and building a strong readership. At the current 2 pages/week rate, there would have to be a long break online between the end of the current story arc and the beginning of the next one, and I didn’t want the readers to suffer that long a hiatus. So hopefully, the new schedule will result in no interruption between stories.

And the change isn’t necessarily bad news, as I will continue with Thursday posts every week. The second weekly post won’t be story content but will be behind-the-scenes posts. The content will range from character turnarounds, to prop and ship diagrams, to concept sketches, to process documents that show my method of working. This will all be in addition to the commentary I’m still providing with each posted story page. So I hope you’ll check out both posts each week!

Thanks to everyone who voiced their comments and votes on the “Feedback Needed” thread. Your feedback was a great help!

But is anyone else interested? The process is labor-intensive for Randy, so he’d have to have significant interest before taking it on. He’d be scratch-building a master, from which he’d create molds to produce sets that buyers could then assemble and paint. According to him, a 12”-14″ model set would cost around $200-250 to buy, and he would need at least 20 people interested.

You can check out Randy’s work at his website: http://randycoopermodels.com/

If you think you might be interested in buying a limited $200-250 model of the Khoruysa Brimia, just let me know by posting your comment in this thread. Thanks!

Oops! These are not the weapons they were expecting!

In order to set up for this reveal, I felt I really had to establish the lighter weapons Roka and crew were expecting the rustlers to have. So they comment on the light rancher weapons while spying on them at the border patrol, and Roka brings it up again on the previous page. It’s one of those tricky things where you’re trying to give information to readers without making it look really obvious that you’re giving them info that’s going to play out later. The idea is always to make it sound as natural as possible, since the more natural it sounds, the less attention it calls to itself.

Hopefully, it wasn’t too obvious that this was going to happen. In general, I don’t like withholding information in the artwork in order to reveal it completely as a surprise later. I think it’s much more fun to include that info in a very subtle way ahead of time, so that readers can come back later and discover that it was there the whole time. Back at the lockbox, when the rustlers pick up their supplies, I actually drew one of them holding one of these heavy guns. The idea was to obscure it visually with snow as much as possible so that it just looks like something random. But it’s there.

See you in issue #3!

So here you finally get a better view of Cember’s poncho. Unlike Roka and Ril’s, it’s obviously a bit flashier with the fur trim and jeweled clasp. Personally, I love the little puff balls dangling from the bottom since they’re so stupid-looking and utterly pointless. And not terribly masculine either. And yet Cember pulls it off. Somehow it just works for him.

By the way, in case there’s any confusion, the rustler aliens aren’t actually female. Cember’s line is just to be a bit jokey and obnoxious.

Ugh. The trees. In my initial concepts, I had planned to do much more alien-looking trees and thought it would be cool to have clump-circles where a single big “spine” tree would grow in the center, surrounded by a ring of smaller trees that grow lateral, flying buttress-like branches to support the main tree, which would need support to carry its snow load. As it turned out, I decided that rings of trees would get really thick in the art and it would be hard to space multiple rings out enough to clearly show the characters in the scenes. So I opted for singular trees instead.

To make them a little more alien, I went with the twisty trunks, with the idea that a couple trees would grow together and intertwine for support (again, I was thinking about the snowload the trees would have to carry on this planet). Ultimately, I’m not crazy about the tree designs as I think they could have been more visually interesting, even if they had just been a bit thicker or more twisty and intertwined, but there you go.

This page marks the start of the nighttime sequence, and I obviously made heavy use of blue overlay tints to enhance the mood and setting. I think it came out well, and I also found it helpful to slightly erase (or mask) the overlay in certain areas to lighten the blue and let the underlying colors show through. I did this to accent specific elements that I wanted readers’ eyes to be drawn to, with the technique being a bit more apparent in the following pages.

In the first pass of the script, this scene with the rustlers didn’t exist, but I eventually came to realize that the story was focusing almost exclusively on the Brimia crew. I hadn’t given any face time to the “bad guys,” so they were just there to be ciphers and obstacles for Roka’s crew without ever having their own personalities. I remember hearing some commentary for LOTR: Return of the King, where the writers mentioned that originally, it was just a giant faceless orc army attacking Minas Tirith. But then it felt lopsided since there were such clear leaders and main characters on the Gondorian/human side, but no such characters on the evil side. So they added Gothmog and some other orc lieutenants to the mix giving out orders and rallying the troops so that the bad guys would have a “point of view” as well as the good guys.

With this scene, I wanted to accomplish the same thing by spending just a few moments with the bad guys. I thought it would be nice to get their names out there and also show that they’re actually quite competent and well aware that they are being followed. I think that sort of thing adds suspense since, as a reader, you now know something the protagonists don’t, and it also establishes the bad guys as more formidable adversaries.