A great example of the tribal bone-in-nose trope in the last panel of this page. I did a survey of the RSP pages to see if he, as a black man, ever used it in his depictions and he didn’t. The stereotype of unsophisticated tribal people endured for decades in television/movies and one has to figure that the trope found legs in the funny books of the day, though in fairness, tribal cultures all over the world have used piercings for thousands of years. And I suppose you could argue that people who lived ten thousand years ago were less sophisticated, technologically at least. These artists were probably using national geographic and the natural history museum for their source material if not drawing from off the top of their heads and riffing on other artists, same way culture works today…
Work continues steadily. At one point these pages were feeling like a bottomless pit… hours of work but the pages still looking unfinished….but things have finally begun to tighten up on the first batch. Doing pretty well on pages 1-7 though I am having trouble with Roger’s costume. I’ve tried half a dozen variations and nothing is fitting. Using photoshop for my color highlights is coming along fine. I’m still tentative as i get the hang of it but so far so good. Having my work flow on one computer will help future projects. By all accounts photoshop is a better app to sketch in than Illustrator… but I’m glad that I can still use Illustrator to ink. One more week of refining pages 8-11 and then I’ll jump into those 4 missing pages. Fingers crossed that goes well. My goal was to have this thing finished by new years and ready to print but I think my process of having one more go at each page before posting here will probably delay that print until summer time…
only 3 pages of Kalthar left! I think we’ll draw these last pages out and start posting Edag 7 after the New Year, okay?
