Bhelith continues to track her mystery quarry through the Lan Se province. In adaptation, we lose the internal monologue that was originally here on these pages from the roleplay in efforts to let the artist tell the story rather than word porn it. Nicoy did a wonderful job on these pages and in the thoughtfulness of her designing of the bow.
It’s an interesting task to revisit something you wrote a long time ago with fresh eyes. There are nuiances that you’ve overlooked, small typos here and there. Sometimes, you wonder WHY you wrote something a particular way.
Adapting a roleplay log- well, we call them logs but they are not like a Chat log.
I do remember a time where I roleplayed online like this:
Lukina: Yesterday at 20:05 *sighs* I… I just don’t know. *looks off to the side*
These days my online roleplay looks more like:
Lukina: Yesterday at 20:05
At her core, Lukina knew her true place in the scheme of things. There was a reason for everything that her Lord commanded. She did not understand the reason why. She had lectured Creature on honor and responsibility. What horrible thing would happen if this strange half breed were to live? What would the future hold?
Was she a knight or an assassin? She dropped the spider on the infant and moved back away, mindful of her position in the tent. All of hopes for her future of being something more than a Bloodtree rested on the spider. Her heart was ice as she waited, there was no joy in this task nor her part in it.
Just a nip and it would be done. She knew the camp had no antivenom for this native creature yet. There had been no time to gather it from the capital. An adult could survive but a child this young…
When we adapt this long block of text to a comic script all of that fluff gets removed. Moving to a visual medium from text can be a challenge. You have to decide what makes the most impactful visual and what dialogue piece actually help drive the narrative forward.
When I started writing comic scripts, I had a dialgoue problem. I just wrote too much of it and my pages were COVERED in words. I’ve learned my lesson since then and have encouraged Mike to do the same. The book can be flowery and have long descriptions of everything since that’s what the reader needs to understand what is going on. That being said, this page was several paragraphs of setting porn. There was also a voice over but Mike thought better of it.
We are finally at the end of this series of flashbacks. Mike and I had made the decision to show this montage sequence showing Lukina’s past intermingled with this short conversation with Malik Voss instead of by itself to help establish the setting a little bit more. This script is very different from its original roleplay narrative because several things happened – we moved websites and then radically changed Malik’s backstory.
Sintija and Voss had a much different story but I am enjoying the novel that we are working on. The novel establishes the world and culture of Jord which is more on the fantasy side of things but will also show the beginning of their relationship.
Nicoy did a wonderful job with this page and with all of Malik’s facial expressions. You can see the “OMG, ENOUGH. DAMN ELVES AND YOUR SPEECHES!” look on his face in panel 2.
Lukina Aleksasha Petrora was originally created to be a drop-in non-player character in the storyline of Knights of Kowloon. My reasoning for this was that I had college coursework and other commitments between my family and work so I wasn’t sure if I could commit the time to writing her. Over the course of several weeks, I found a balance and was writing more Lukina material than any of my other characters. People seemed to really like interacting with her. I had envisioned her as silent, stoic and over the course of roleplaying her, she opened up. Her history was originally only a few short paragraphs but some of her life and the memories, even her mother, was explored in segments. It was after 3 months of writing her that I was reminded that Lukina was a player character.
I try to add depth to all of my characters and it seems that when it comes to NPCs, people get attached to mine so they become main storyline narrative characters. I definitely didn’t think that a year ago Lukina would be the main focus of a comic. The idea of making a comic with these characters was a bit of an idea. I was resistant because adaptation of written narrative into comic format is time consuming. What works for a book doesn’t always work in comic format. And we have a lot of source material. This script reads slightly differently to how we originally wrote it last year but, the changes make sense and are for the better visually!
I am guilty in many of my earlier comics for being too verbose. I have learned the value of showing and not telling. This was a bit of a compromise in the narrative since we are introducing the setting in this comic. She’s naming places and things but there is no reference point for a new reader. So – we have a long series of short flashbacks to give a taste of things being hectic. The events that made Lukina to be who she is are still vague. Her relationship with her mother is obviously strained but it’ll be something touched on at another point.
If you are enjoying the comic please let us know on our Discord! If you’d like us to return to weekly updates, please consider donating! There is a cost to making these since Mike and I are not drawing them. Nicoy is an amazing artist and we’re also supporting her work by hiring her. <3
