FROM THE ARCHIVES: Issue One, Page Eight

This week’s post continues my From The Archives series, where I revisit one of my earlier pages and provide some insight on its creation. I’m going in chronological order, so that those of you who have just discovered the comic can get caught up!

Hello again, and if you’re a new subscriber, welcome!

Today I’m going to talk about this page:

This is possibly one of, if not the most, simplistic pages I drew for issue one. Looking back at it, I still cringe a little. These days I put a LOT more detail into my pages, so it’s hard to shake the feeling that I really skimped on this one. It was done with a deliberate purpose, though: at this point in the comic’s development, I was still trying to maintain a weekly posting schedule, but I had run out of “buffer” pages and so I had to work out a way of getting this page done as fast as possible, while still designing panels that fit the lyrics he was singing.

Dropping out the backgrounds was the easiest way to do this, because it’s obviously less to draw. But I still wanted to make a joke out of it, so I thought having him framed against a blank sky, and then pulling the camera back further in each panel, finally revealing that Steve is standing on top of a tower overlooking the entire city of Kurtzberg, was a good way of accomplishing both of those goals at once.

I had found a 3D cityscape model in the Clip Studio store (another great feature of that software, which has all sorts of cool stuff to download, including custom brushes and 3D models, a lot of them totally free) and that was a very helpful time saver in the final panel. I drew a bunch of buildings in the foreground, and added some clouds of steam to try and make the 3D buildings less obvious.

While this page is the simplest in terms of art, in terms of the writing, this page is pretty much the thematic crux of the song. The lyrics that he’s singing on this page are actually summing up the theme of the song quite succinctly and directly:

“I think Kurtzberg City’s great! It’s two thumbs up! It’s aces!

Even though I haven’t seen a ton of other places…

Although I don’t get out much, if at all, for what it’s worth…

I know that Kurtzberg truly is the greatest place on Earth!”

I grew up in Australia, and I think because it’s a big island, isolated from other countries by miles (okay, kilometers) of water, there’s a kind of inherent travel bug in the national psyche there. It’s a very common, almost universal rite of passage for young Australians to get out of the country and see the world in their early twenties. It’s what led me to want to live and work in the US, and so when I first moved here, I was surprised that so many Americans I met had never been to another country - and yet, ironically, there was an inherent conviction held by so many that America was “the greatest country on Earth”. I could only wonder, if you’ve never been anywhere else, how would you know?

That blind conviction was what I was commenting on and satirizing with this song. Steamroller Man is a happy-go-lucky optimist, convinced that he’s living in the greatest city on Earth, while never actually having been anywhere else. He’s also blissfully ignorant of the fact that while he’s having a great time, sometimes he’s actually making life worse for the other people living in that city.

At least his heart’s in the right place, I suppose.

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Thanks for reading! For my paid subscribers, I’ve got an earlier version of this page (before I tweaked it for print), as well as the rough layout and pencil version. If you like that kind of process stuff, a yearly subscription is only $30!