Final Quest #15 - Delayed.

Well, he thinks Venka hates him. However, the difference is that now it seems he's willing (able) to take actions to undo that hate.



Which, when you think about it, is kinda neat. We have one person (Two-Edge) who might finally be cured of a 20,000 year long madness, while another (Cutter) is falling into the depths of madness himself.

That's an excellent point!

Redhead Ember wrote:

Well, he thinks Venka hates him. However, the difference is that now it seems he's willing (able) to take actions to undo that hate.



Which, when you think about it, is kinda neat. We have one person (Two-Edge) who might finally be cured of a 20,000 year long madness, while another (Cutter) is falling into the depths of madness himself.

I like that idea.

Just saw this from Wendy on FB:

Quote :

I don't always fall in love with an issue of Final Quest right away - especially when I consider it a "problem" issue with lots of crowd scenes and complicated action to stage. But Elfquest - the Final Quest #15 contains some of the most beautiful work Sonny Strait and I have done together. We both have such a deep love and understanding of the organic, that must be why.

Oooooo boy. Lots of crowd scenes? "Organic" Sonny Strait?? My expectations are now well and truly managed.

And just when I thought things had taken a turn for the better. Sigh.

Am I the only one who feels she shouldn't be allowed to say something like that.

lol Organic.

Forewarned.

I don't care if she wants to toot her own horn. It's funny and a little hippy-dippy, but I don't really mind.

What gets me is that she knows all these crowd scenes are problematic. She knows they're visual dead-weight, and she knows a lot of the composition is overstuffed and underserved. Yet she still uses it as a default in every issue. It just...boggles my mind. Wendy is an amazing artist. She knows this isn't effective or engaging or pleasant to look at.

I'm only an amateur artist, but I can visualize any number of alternatives to these "line 'em up" crowd scenes. For example, include fewer characters. We don't need to see every elf at a given location. We could just assume they're around and doing something interesting. Relegate narrative exposition to a text box.

I'll hold off on judgment until I see the issue - but previous work in final quest does not say 'excellent crowd placement' at all...
Yes, I'm a bit hoping against hope, I guess.

What I don't understand - if you look at the original quest books - she had no problems with crowds - whether it was Sun Folk, Wolfriders, (not really much of a crowd in Blue Mountain), but the Go-Backs, certainly - so I am struggling to understand what the "issue" is with crowds? She's done it before beautifully.

But to that - I certainly don't feel her art is better now than it was before. But that's just my personal taste.

I think the issue is that she did it all by hand before, and yeah, it was always lovely - and obviously very time-consuming to draw as well! But since the Photoshop stuff has become the norm, the crowd scenes are fairly terrible now, and look very cut and pasted, stiff, and have lost a kind of richness and soulfulness they used to possess. That's why I think they're being regarded as a waste...if they can be avoided to save time, and if you know they look so much better done by hand, then why go out of your way to repeatedly do crowd scenes with such a subpar medium that doesn't do you justice? Using the term organic to describe them is a really strange choice of words, unless she's gone back to drawing crowds by hand, which I really cannot imagine at this stage. I'm not much of an expert in terms of coloring for comics so I have no context to draw from, but what I see of Sonny's work feels sort of garish and gaudy in terms of color. Again, organic is just a strange choice of words for his work but we shall see, I suppose.

To be fair, Sonny Strait is a very good artist. I loved his We Shadows. The thing is however, that his art tends to be chaotic and he rarely completes one of his own comics. Still, the coloring's better than is SATS and Discovery if not in Original Quest quality.

He's average to mediocre.

Zadzi wrote:

...since the Photoshop stuff has become the norm, the crowd scenes are fairly terrible now, and look very cut and pasted, stiff, and have lost a kind of richness and soulfulness they used to possess. That's why I think they're being regarded as a waste...if they can be avoided to save time, and if you know they look so much better done by hand, then why go out of your way to repeatedly do crowd scenes with such a subpar medium that doesn't do you justice? Using the term organic to describe them is a really strange choice of words, unless she's gone back to drawing crowds by hand, which I really cannot imagine at this stage. I'm not much of an expert in terms of coloring for comics so I have no context to draw from, but what I see of Sonny's work feels sort of garish and gaudy in terms of color. Again, organic is just a strange choice of words for his work but we shall see, I suppose.

All of this! ^

I personally think she isn't good with Photoshop. You can't draw the same way as by hand with a cintiq. You sacrifice line quality and some level of grace. It was probably a lot faster for her to draw figures by hand-- just less easy to edit or ink. The convenience of Photoshop is in the cleanliness and the ability to edit things. And in the coloring, if you can do it well... But I don't think it's great for line art. I think it made her line art really stiff and I think she does a lot of awkward posing and creates artificial feeling scenes by cutting and pasting characters and probably by drawing them independently and placing them in scenes rather than simply drawing the full scene.

Thank god she mostly stopped using the clone brush and preprogrammed Photoshop brushes though, like the one for grass or leaves. That lasted right up until the final quest prequel. Btw-- I really did like a lot of the colors in the prequel. It looked time consuming, but it was mostly quite pretty. Leetah on the beach during Korafaye's birth-- that whole sequence-- was really gorgeous. Some scenes, like Ruffel's death scene, were a little too dark for a printed page tho-- which I think is another problem with Photoshop: on the computer screen, everything is backlit-- on a page, it's not. It looks brighter when you draw it.

Sonny's coloring started off good, I think. But he ended up (I'm going to guess) not putting as much time into later issues. I feel like he's not putting thought into the lighting lately-- and monochrome scenes are losing their detail.

The problem is basically contrast. He needs to pay more attention to contrast. It would really help if he were to desaturate each scene he colors to see it as black and white shading-- just to double check that he is getting the light source and shadows right-- and that the characters are standing out from the background.

None of this is mysterious.

I agree with everything you said, Zadzi. Hit the nail on the head.

I, also, am not a huge fan of Sonny's. His EQ stuff is fine and certainly better than some of the other folks they had working under the EQ label for a while, but then...most of those were really subpar. I haven't been impressed with his coloring. The colors in the FQ special were way better. I just glanced back through it and was reminded that a lot of the art was very good, overall! There is a sense in many places of figures being drawn separately and then "placed" in a panel, and there's also some cut-and-pasting of art---but it's less noticeable, fewer and farther between. The layout of the panels is more dynamic and unusual.

Wisp wrote:

I don't care if she wants to toot her own horn.  It's funny and a little hippy-dippy, but I don't really mind.

What gets me is that she knows all these crowd scenes are problematic.  She knows they're visual dead-weight, and she knows a lot of the composition is overstuffed and underserved.  Yet she still uses it as a default in every issue.  It just...boggles my mind.  Wendy is an amazing artist.  She knows this isn't effective or engaging or pleasant to look at.  

I'm only an amateur artist, but I can visualize any number of alternatives to these "line 'em up" crowd scenes.  For example, include fewer characters.  We don't need to see every elf at a given location.  We could just assume they're around and doing something interesting.  Relegate narrative exposition to a text box.

Or even one thing she's done that I think did work pretty well -- putting some of the elves in silhouette. Or even just not having everybody facing forward, which would also go a long way toward making the world feel as rich as classic Elfquest, where elves had other things to focus on than the camera. Or drawing elves in the background in less detail, which IMO looks better anyway.

I really appreciate your commentary on the colors, Lunakat. As someone who's just dipping a toe into coloring my drawings (and really needs to take a color theory class), it gives me some idea of pitfalls to watch out for.

Final Quest #15 - teaser is online!

For everyone who likes to speculate.

I predict Strongbow will eventually come around

Well, I see his penchant for self-absorption still knows no bounds.

I can see Moonshade's letter to Dear Prudence now.

"Dear Prudence: I've been with my wonderful husband for 900 years now, and we seem to be drifting apart. I've always know he can be small-minded, intolerant, and completely incapable of change, with many psychological triggers (sometimes I wonder if he has undiagnosed PTSD or something), but he's always been a great guy and a wonderful father. But a few decades ago, I fell into a patch of depression, and he really didn't know how to help me, especially when I was considering alternate spiritual perspectives.

"Now I've gone back to school and I'm pursuing an exciting new career. He was very supportive at first - as long as I was home in time to make him supper and keep the same old routines. But now I've changed my religion too - I had a real spiritual awakening that helped me a lot with my depression - and he won't stop complaining that I'm not the same person, that I've betrayed him, that he will lose me forever now.

"Prudie, I was making my peace with what seemed like a pretty clear breakup - he pretty much told me our love was dead! But then he keeps calling me, trying to get me back, but only on HIS terms. The other day he called me up on Skype, *saying* he wanted to talk, then complaining about my makeover! It just rips open new wounds all over again. Therapy doesn't seem to be an option - he doesn't like to talk about his feelings. Is there some way I can make him understand how much this hurts? Should I stop taking his calls? Do I need to make a clean break. He's SUCH a wonderful guy otherwise, but the incessant emotional roller-coaster is really starting to weigh me down. Signed Newly Six-Feet-Tall, Feeling Six Inches Small."

I see botox is another palace perk. Does no one have facial expressions anymore in this comic? It's really weird.

I'm sorry to sound so negative. I just miss Wendy's vibrant drawing and it's most noticed in the faces.

wingthing wrote:

Well, I see his penchant for self-absorption still knows no bounds.

I can see Moonshade's letter to Dear Prudence now.

"Dear Prudence: I've been with my wonderful husband for 900 years now, and we seem to be drifting apart. I've always know he can be small-minded, intolerant, and completely incapable of change, with many psychological triggers (sometimes I wonder if he has undiagnosed PTSD or something), but he's always been a great guy and a wonderful father. But a few decades ago, I fell into a patch of depression, and he really didn't know how to help me, especially when I was considering alternate spiritual perspectives.

"Now I've gone back to school and I'm pursuing an exciting new career. He was very supportive at first - as long as I was home in time to make him supper and keep the same old routines. But now I've changed my religion too - I had a real spiritual awakening that helped me a lot with my depression - and he won't stop complaining that I'm not the same person, that I've betrayed him, that he will lose me forever now.

"Prudie, I was making my peace with what seemed like a pretty clear breakup - he pretty much told me our love was dead! But then he keeps calling me, trying to get me back, but only on HIS terms. The other day he called me up on Skype, *saying* he wanted to talk, then complaining about my makeover! It just rips open new wounds all over again. Therapy doesn't seem to be an option - he doesn't like to talk about his feelings. Is there some way I can make him understand how much this hurts? Should I stop taking his calls? Do I need to make a clean break. He's SUCH a wonderful guy otherwise, but the incessant emotional roller-coaster is really starting to weigh me down. Signed Newly Six-Feet-Tall, Feeling Six Inches Small."

I still feel sorry for Strongbow, I cant help it!
And I'm happy for Moonshade and all that.... it just all seems so very kumbayia and boring there. The Palace has never interested me and I've never seen it as compelling in any way.

wanna write Strongbow's letter to an Agony Aunt? I'm sure Moonshade comes off just as bad from his POV. "Help, my wife's been sucked into a cult!" or the like

Moonshades hair looks like extensions and fake as hell. Don't like it. Hair doesn't work like that.

wingthing wrote:

wanna write Strongbow's letter to an Agony Aunt? I'm sure Moonshade comes off just as bad from his POV. "Help, my wife's been sucked into a cult!" or the like

Challenge accepted!

(Though if anyone else wants to take a shot too, go ahead!)

I'll probably take a shot at this and I'll be late, because I'm packing to go off camping for the rest of the week!

@ Zinegirl, yeah the hair doesn't look so great. Lunakat was talking about it somewhere and how that's kind of how it's done in Photoshop or something where it's just cut and pasted all over (I think). The effect is really strange and unnatural-looking.

Does anyone remember the brief period when Moonshade was all pissy and combative to Ember after she'd parted from Strongbow and the original group? I kind of loved it, loved seeing that delicious little conflict play out. I miss that.
At this point, the Moonshade/Strongbow thing is starting to get old in FQ, like it's this ongoing soap opera that's not really interesting anymore because it's the same song on each side...The symphony of Join Us/Me in How Could You minor....or vice versa.