Don't mind us...

Lots of cameos of Patreon supporters in this shot- see if you can spot yours!

COMMENTS

Mini Giantess Hug FTW

Page 128 and 129 were originally scripted as one page, to which Dee shook her head and informed me I was a nut. So, this page gets a little room to breathe (unlike Stanley) and we move to what is more conventionally considered a comics panel. Seems so... big, and empty...

DEE’S NOTES

…which, I think, helps with the pacing of the overall scene. This page is a lot more open, giving their emotions room to breathe as the tension is lifted and they are reconciled. And Ronni is, if nothing else, a hugger.

COMMENTS

Page 128

Sorry for the super powers

If you inflict super powers on someone to get them to follow you around and bail you out, it seems logical that eventually you have to offer an apology for that when you do come clean. So, in the spirit of starting to make things right with the world, Ronni starts with her best friend, and finds he’s pretty forgiving, all things considered.

Hooray, flashback panel! Because it never gets old watching Prom Queen catch on fire.

DEE’S NOTES

The idea of the flashback panels is two-fold, really. Of course, it helps make a talkin-head scene a LOT more interesting to read, but also… c’mon. That was a LITERAL blast to draw! Prom Queen is just a joy to draw and getting to play with Stanley’s power visuals is great.

Ronni biting her bottom lip with her hand up there is a thing I absolutely acted out at my chair, taking pictures of myself with my phone, and no. You cannot see them. :P

COMMENTS

Making The Rounds

I love the idea that when Giant Girl disappears, everyone comes to 64 Bit for answers, for whatever reason they are seeking her. Grandpa, Pussycat, the Admiral, the Cosmonaut, the Agency, the Scholars and even Hero Man all grilling Stanley, while he clearly chose to visit Kaiju Island himself. It’s a bit of an illustration of how these people all intersect at Giant Girl.

The design of the Ultraman-esque character was a creation of one of our Patreon patrons. Thanks Danny! Biptoe lives, in all his snack food glory. And I love how King Ralphasaurus and Badonkasaurus look in this shot- monster royalty at it’s finest!

DEE’S NOTES

I will ALWAYS love any opportunity to draw monsters, and Badonkasaurus is probably still my favorite secondary character in the series, neck and neck with Lexii. Can’t wait to draw more of them.

The interrogation scene has been living in my imagination for a WHILE and it was a challenge to get it all in there in a fun and visually interesting way.

COMMENTS

Confession Time

Continuing from the previous page, Stanley once again calls Ronni out on her bullshit. And the difference here is that she finally admits it. See, she’s coming around to a larger decision and a fundamental shift in how she does things. But as she puts it out there, she still can’t help but make it about herself. Which shows that she’s grown up some, but still has a long way to go.

GamePit Stanley FTW, as well as a cameo of OG GG.

DEE’S NOTES

Another page where my love of visual “acting” gets put to good use. I really enjoyed the three-panel “confession” sequence that took advantage of proportion and space to really drag out the time. Plus, CAMEOS and Patreon patron’s aplenty!

The lightning bolt was specifically drawn to look different from the ones we did for Stratonimbus, with no random mini-tendrils of electricity branching off. This was a controlled and concentrated “bolt from the blue”.

COMMENTS

Figuring it out

If you read that descent into Hell, to the boiler room ‘office’ of S8N back in issue 13, he really did cover a lot of ground, and point out some very good points. Which, now that we’ve revealed Ronni’s origin, begin to make a bit more sense. So Stanley just comes right out and explains what he’s figured out in those 5 years, and confronts Ronni with it. Who is, or course, evasive, as always.

64 Bit had 5 years to think all this over. It’s only been a fortnight for Giant Girl.

I love how Dee depicts 64’s video game avatars, with cel shading and the pixilation. It’s very cool to me.

DEE’S NOTES

This is one of those pages where I took the script and added a bunch of panels. The entire bottom row was largely broken up from, I believe, what was written to only be about two. Stanley spoke and then Ronni reacted. I pitched the idea in the bluelines of cutting back to panels of Ronni’s REACTIONS mid-speech in narrow, claustrophobic and shrinking insets, and I think it works well.

Also, Stanley transforming his arm to showcase his powers wasn’t in the script initially either. The creative back and forth is a great part of what makes this a really fun comic to create for both of us.

Stanley’s transformation effect was something I REALLY worked on creating a look for. It takes a LOT of inspiration from both TRON movies, where Kevin Flynn is first digitized in the original, and the DE-rexxing into voxels in TRON LEGACY. The cel shading for the shadowing was a way to subtly show, in an otherwise mostly black and white comic, that what he transforms into aren’t as really real as how we render reality.

COMMENTS

Scum and Villainy

Prom Queen was an early departure for the series, as she was the first genuine threat Giant Girl faced who was determined to extinguish her. Which in turn caused Ronni to get big enough for her foot to fill a football field, and her stomp cracked the earth’s crust a bit. I’d always planned for her to escape- if you paid attention, there’s a scene in issue 11 at Bobbie Doll’s funeral. The Agency gives GG grief about her handling of PQ, and so she zips her scepter back to full size and hands it off to the Agents, knowing it’ll probably result in catastrophe. But they are riding her ass about it, so she hands the responsibility off to them, so Prom Queen will be their problem.

Which, now we see how that worked out.

Another Flying Spaghetti Monster cameo for the win, this time in his part-time gig as a busboy at the Asteroid Belt Diner instead of telling fortunes.

After which we settle into a serious conversation. I love how Stanley’s final line just cuts through it all. Stay tuned...

DEE’S NOTES

Koen’s art and design on Prom Queen as she continued to evolve and destroy in her initial appearance were intimidating to try and adapt. I  first took a shot MANY pages ago in her origin flashback, and have decided to really embrace a more cartoony sense of proportion to her here. I loved the idea that the Mass Driver warped her physically and that those alterations have remained in her twisted face and proportions.

I LOVE drawing her, and visualizing what she looked like upon breaking out was too much fun.

COMMENTS

Family Matters

Ralph Everest and the trial of the century is something we’ve touched on, but never fully illustrated. It’s scheduled to be shown in Issue 19, which we’re expecting to be putting out sometime late next year I think?

It’s coming, one page at a time.

Meanwhile, sensational trials of the 1970s are ancient history today. Most folks under the age of 30 don’t even know who Jim Jones was anymore, or even Charlie Manson. So while Mr. Big might get the occasional recognition, likely it is less and less every year. So he spends less and less of his time doing his Harrison Ford impression.

Which, it’s very possible, is also a reference old enough that no one gets it anymore, either. Ain’t time a gasser?

I love how punked Ronni looks when Stanley gives her the news and he leans into it. Dakota Kane is a rage monster- literally, as you can see in issue 11, the flashback to the 90s. She is where Ronni gets a lot of her self-destructive tendencies, and her temper. Which she tries to control, because nobody wants to grow up to be their abusive mother.

Meanwhile, the Asteroid Diner and Truckstop is kind of perfectly envisioned here, and for some reason the trucker superhero who is now a space trucker, living with the meanest waitress this side of Alpha Centauri, makes me laugh a lot.

And the page is rife with cameos that are pretty darned obscure to anyone but us, but again, that makes us happy.

DEE’S NOTES

The cameos were a LOT of fun to draw. I will give a trillion internet bragging points to anyone who can figure out who even 3/4th of the cameos are! Hint: You would literally need to be stalking Sabrina and I in our personal lives to even have a shot!

Also, please do NOT stalk us. Lol

Also fun was getting to REALLY go nuts with the cartooniness here and stretch the comedy muscles, even with Ronni and Stanley in the coffee shop. As always, I love drawing solid “acting” and this page has a LOT.

COMMENTS

Young blood and the old guard

News of the World

There’s a Danger Team book I’ve written, that seems like it’s the first 2 issues of a longer story. In it I introduce Hawkins as he uncovers the truth behind Admiral Action, Action Atoll and the many incarnations of the Danger Team. To publish it I would need to do a kickstarter, hire an artist, construct at least the first issue then try to find a publisher. That’s how it seems to work these days.

Apparently I need to get better at the business aspect of this gig.

All that aside, here’s the south Pacific base of the Admiral, Action Atoll. From here rockets are launched, vehicles borrowed and occasionally funding and backup are to be had, at least for Giant Girl. Admiral Bradley Action holds the rights to the island, which he allows usage to a number of world governments, under the understanding that he is his own island nation. Complete with his own air force, navy and space program. We’ll be seeing more of him in the next issue... when we get there.

As the Admiral is the benefactor and recruiter of the Danger Team, we took this opportunity to introduce the Danger Team 22. Usually he forms one every 11 years, but the 2007 team was a change in that pattern, and that’s where Stanley met Ronni, as told in Issue 3. We debated putting names on all of the characters, but felt we could do that better in supplementary material.

For the record? Victor, Major Catastrophe XIII, Bubblegum Bazooka, Atomic Doll, The Mighty Barbie, Cyberninja and the Libtertarian. They’re battling Steampunk Rock and Sergeant Major Steam (who has yet to release his Battlin’ Bot Brigade), from back in Issue 4. If I keep writing that Danger Team book (that’s not got an artist yet) they all have backstories and plots, of course.

The Scholars of the Impossible is a high school for exceptional kids concept that I came up with as something to do with Maddie Lee, introduced in ‘The Other Giant Girl’ short story, and who got Ronni’s old big red hat back in issue 12. I developed the school, the staff and the primary characters, setting them up to be opposed by S8N’s School for Girls (from issue 13) amongst others. But I could never seem to get an artist to gel on the book, so it languished. This is that concept moved to the 4th season, essentially. The kids are young adults now,and the school is more of a base as alumni, as they are a globetrotting crew of adventurers.

Hiro and Shiro Nakatomi, the Trouble Twins. Little Big Girl, of course. Wifi, Arbitrary Jones, Gotharella and her guardian spirit, the Crimson Ghost.

I warned Dee in advance this was going to be a lot. I had designs and reference for some of these characters, but for others she had to generate the character concept art on the spot. All of which turned out great, and I am deliriously happy with the results.

DEE’S NOTES

This page was a hard one to get done and took a good bit longer than usual, but designing the characters on the page streamlined a bit of the process. There was a lot of creative back and forth between us on Discord with screen sharing, and the end result is a page I’m really proud of.

Plus, I finally get to draw some real superheroes! Woot!

COMMENTS