The Plan

After establishing all that time getting in, here’s her plan- get the macguffin, and use it to empower herself. She’s done the research and she’s done the setup, and she’s gotten in. The girl with no powers who is crossing the very powerful Agency engages her cufflink to make science waves to cover her tracks. Then when the dangerous artifact is delivered to her, we can see her emotions play out across her face.

I was going to leave this as silent panels and let Dee’s artwork say it all, because honestly, it does. But  I was so fond of my descriptions of the panels, they lent themselves to narration, and I combined the two. Although to be honest, Dee’s art tells you exactly what’s going on in her head.

DEE’S NOTES

The vault was designed to be one-part ‘door room from Monsters Inc.’, and one part ‘Cabin in the Woods creature storage facility’. And I have to say that I really enjoy drawing mousy Ronni. Especially as we see that fire we all know she has in her work it’s way to the surface.

Like a lot of these pages, I took Sabrina’s script and really tried to focus the action on the emotions. And for a page with 12 panels, I don’t think it ever felt cramped to me in the design. This sequence is the most important scene I’ve yet drawn in the book, and it needed to express a LOT in a short period of time.

COMMENTS

Origin Story Flashback

I know some of you have been with us for an actual decade now, reading since the beginning, or caught up after you found us. Which I am hopefully going to have the archives in place soon. Bear with us. All of you have one very large unanswered question though- how did Giant Girl get her powers, and just what powers does she have, anyway?

As we wanted this book- because make no mistake, issue 17 was always meant to be a full length graphic novel- to be self-contained, this moment alone with Lexii was the perfect place for Veronica’s crisis of conscience as she recounts just how she got here. Well, part of it, really- more of it comes out in next issue.

Point being, it’s high time we told it. So, we present to you the first part of the Giant Girl Origin Story ©.

DEE’S NOTES

While the script here was tight, I still had a ton of room to play and explore. The first panel was my idea, giving us a transition image of her telling her story to Lexii where I shamelessly riff on a classic John Romita Jr. profile close up that I loved drawing. The rest, as busy as it is, was a delight to play with.

This was my first opportunity to draw some of the other characters, such as Ronni’s grandfather in his Mr. Big costume and Agents Smith, Jones and Man, which was a lot of fun. But I also got to draw and design ‘Agent Girl’ for the very first time. So we get to see a PRE-Giant Girl Veronica Kane, in all of her frizzy, anxious looking glory. Or, lack thereof, as it is.

Also, there is a TON of stuff in the backgrounds here. Enjoy.

COMMENTS

Wave of my hand

At this point, Lexii’s hero worship has bulldozed into Ronni’s imposter syndrome, and we’re about to find out why. The little bit of Lexii asking if she’d done something wrong was an addition from Dee that felt too authentic to omit, because I think we’ve all been there. Some surprising honesty from Ronni sets the stage here, slowing things down a bit for that stark silhouetted panel.

Also, navigation now available at the top as well as bottom of the comic, and the actual galleries and back issues are coming soon! Hang in there folks!

DEE’S NOTES

This page was all about the expressions, and we went back and forth on them a FEW times before we were both happy with them. With Lexii, there has been a lot of fun had with her lust for Ronni, but here we REALLY get to see that for the pixie, there’s a lot more than just that. She sees Ronni in a way that Ronni herself has a hard time seeing, and it was important to capture both the sincerity of Lexii’s absolute admiration and Ronni’s emotional vulnerability.

The way I see it, getting small has really made Ronni FEEL small again, which is why I wanted to keep the ‘camera’ looking down on her for most of this scene, with the exception of panel 5. Of course, in that panel we’re looking up at her, but Lexii is almost filling her background. It’s all purposefully claustrophobic so that, hopefully, the tension Ronni is feeling comes across.

COMMENTS

We’re all counting on you

This entire page exists solely to establish they have arrived at their destination. But true to form, Ronni is complaining about the ride there, which Lexii handily dismisses, then refocuses Ronni on her mission. In doing so, she is clearly fangirling just a little bit, because she believes in heroes. She does, after all, live in a world of high fantasy, where the tales and the legends all tend to be true.

Love to the flailing ‘Hydra’ arms of Ronni’s cartoonish expression of panic, and that slappy hand against the finger in the tummy. Pathos and cartooning, cheesecake and drama, one stop shopping- Giant Girl Adventures!

DEE’S NOTES

It’s that “one-stop shopping” that has made this such a fun comic to draw. I really get to have it all, artistically as this comic can go from epic action, emotional seriousness and slapstick without losing its heart or identity. The cartoonist in me, however, really adores getting to play in sequences like this with the wacky body language and expressions.

COMMENT!

Into the Citadel

Somewhere out there, the Death Dealer nodded in grim agreement of this particular snoozing guard’s attire. This particular giant is John Arnold, the fellow who created Imperial Urth and the campaign setting upon which I based much of this adventure yarn.

The perils of infiltrating the giant citadel are numerous, beyond knocking the helmet off a sleeping guard with your tiny ass. Edna Mode warned us about capes, but Ronni insists, which gives her a bit of trouble here. Falling icicles- put your eye out, kid. And the guard wandering the halls squinting through a gem seems like a guy to avoid the old-fashioned way, thinks Lexii.

Acrobatic flying. Not for the faint of digestion.

DEE’S NOTES

The backgrounds took up a lot of time and detail, to really give a strong sense of space with the interior of our citadel. Going through this sequence was a lot of fun, as Sabrina and I split the duties a bit in coming up with the calamities for them to try and avoid in the bottom panels, talking out different ideas. The falling ice was mine, but that’s a good showcase of how collaborative the process is.

There’s a lot of room to elaborate in the pages and Sabrina’s scripts give me room to play, such as the helmet getting knocked off, which was a visual gag added in the layout stage.

COMMENT!

Elf Blossoms

This was something we wanted to bring a bit of attention to in the story, because we love the character beats, and we’re fond of Flynna. This ‘meanwhile’ scene give Britomart the chance to be something other than the stern martial voice of law, and instead showcase a bit more of the ‘good’ part of her nature. She’s happy for Flynna, realizes it might not be welcome news and delivers it to her privately.

It’s cartoonishly clear that Flynna hadn’t really considered a pregnancy to be a real possibility until now, as she realizes she certainly can, and she is.

Background looting of the corpses, because it’s a fact of life in a fantasy economy. I particularly like Halder getting that giant ring, and using the dead mimic as a treasure chest.

DEE’S NOTES

Those little gags when the non-primary characters are in the background are always fun to work out. It’s something that I learned from cartoonist Kyle Baker, that characters doing almost ANYTHING is better than them just standing around. So, taking Sabrina’s instructions to have them looting the bodies gave me a lot of room to play.

The humor and visual interplay between Flynna and Britomart was a lot of fun to work out and draw, with both still having fairly cartoony faces that allowed for some good takes.

To flit

With the size and mass of the citadel established, I asked for a travelogue of the girls flying their way in, penetrating the giant’s fortress unseen. We get our first glimpses of the frost giants, and a comedy act about the fae and the flit. The script called for ‘moody and ominous’ and the end product is a rather distinctly Latverian edifice.

DEE’S NOTES

The travelogue was a great idea and I love that it gave me the opportunity to have more fun drawing some fun acting with the teeny tiny figures that pushed the humor of their interaction. It also allowed us to show both how big and winding the city is and run a visual path throughout the page. HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, CLICK HERE?

You feel me

Once up in the air, the sheer scope and scale of the frost giant citadel is laid out for the reader. While a crack in the glacier would have been more appropriate a locale for the seat of their empire, I wanted some grandeur to the frost giants with their cold, frozen hearts. This is a large, obviously painstakingly planned and constructed citadel that shows the strength of these mighty beings. This is the frost giants at the height of their power, before they became creatures of legend. When they were, instead, simply legendary.

That’s what I asked for out of this page. I got what I asked for, and I am impressed.

Plus boob joke. Here’s that the line art looked like for that piece, because it lost a lot of the charm in the ‘invisibility’ effect.

Well, okay, that’s a production drawing, because of the bluelines. But you get the idea. THAT DERP FACE OF LUST.

DEE’S NOTES

For the city, I took my idea for the concentric rings working out from the center and built the structure in basic shapes in the 3-D program, Sketch-Up, which allowed me to really set up the more intricate perspectives I wanted and tweak it before going into the actual art, which made this far easier than it would have been otherwise.

This was also a splash page in the script, but I pitched the two inset panels to really sell that boob joke, and it’s really good example of how well Sabrina and I work together. It’s always about what’s best for the page and what tells the story the way we want. Humor is a huge part of GGA, and I really loved getting to play with the visuals of this boob gag.

What they can’t see

Okay, so given that we really do often cram a lot of action into our pages, this was a deliberate slowing of that pace to continue to focus on the two lady adventurers here. In this case, I wanted to give Dee a little room to artistically explore how the two of them would work invisibly, which actually played out rather well, going back to the pioneer we learned it from, Alex Toth.

We tried a version with Ronni’s red tints, and it really didn’t work out. We publish all of that stuff on the Patreon every Sunday for the folks who are interested and support us. A LOT of production drawings every week, as every screenshot Dee sends me ends up in the file and we share the map of how we got to where we ended up from where we started. We show you the blue lines through all of the edits, even dialogue changes.

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DEE’S NOTES

I tried a few different ways to make them look invisible while still keeping them clearly visible for the reader, and this white lined "Space Ghost" technique was the winner when I submitted it, and nothing else that I'd tried, to Sabrina for review.

While it seems, otherwise, like a simple enough page, there was some back and forth on the proportion of their heads to make everything flow right. Having Ronnie essentially be the size of a toddler in relation to Lexii here adds a little bit of extra work to keep it consistent, which has been a fun challenge.

Unromantic transactions

After Ronni promises to trade her flesh for help from the pixie, Britomart is understandably a bit stunned. Clearly from his expression, Ali is picturing it in his head, while Dirk is just amused. There is a doodle that might just come to light about Ali Kazaam’s thought balloon, most likely on Patreon.

I originally had the sidebar conversation with the elves as just silent, but after I’d seen the art, the idea to play that out a bit was too good. Meanwhile, Smoke and R’lithon decide it’s none of their business and muppet, stage right.

This bit exists for plot purposes- to reinforce that Dirk Swann is the consummate adventurer, to put the whistle into play and to reinforce to us that he is always watching, listening, and taking note. On this expedition of ‘denizens of the supernature’, he is the mere mortal human, the ‘everyman’ amongst this cast of fantastic legendary figures, there at the behest of the ruling authority of humankind, watching out for mankind’s interests.

I asked for an adorable shot of the two tiny women kissing the bard on the cheek. I was not in any way disappointed.

DEE’S NOTES

There’s lots of fun opportunities for me to really dig into the acting and the body language here and explore the script as Sabrina wrote it. In the scrip, the exchanged between Flynna and Haldr was essentially a note that Flynna looked a little disgusted at what was happening with Ronni and Lexii and that was about it.  That lead to me deciding that in panel two, she should perhaps be walking away in a huff, originally because I wanted to have some of the character seen walking AWAY so that when Dirk mentioned that he would keep Ronni’s secret, we could see that they had at least a smidge of privacy.

In reviewing the rough blue lines of the page, that all lead to Sabrina and I fleshing out a single, tiny background element into what it is now, giving us a bit more of a look into their heads and making our troupe feel more like individuals, and not just background players. The creation process is usually very organic, and I always love when an idea grows legs and finds direction.