#Etho you're doing yourself no favors even if you didn't build them you could have just Lied and claimed them

[no-oneknowsmyname]

Etho claiming that he's only built the statues for himself and for Joel is,,,,, like there's two options for this

He's lying and he's in gaslight era, he's built the other hermit statues but no one has proof and he's gonna let the joke continue until he's caught

He's genuinely only built the statues for himself and Joel which does him no favors for the who's-more-obsessed-with-who allegations and someone on the server is purposely trying and succeeding to confuse the ever living hell out of him right now

Both are funny

[comicaurora]

If this is rude to ask please please ignore, this is from the perspective of someone in pre-planning stages of my own comic:

How long did it take you to shrink from the 30(?) page buffer I think you said you started with to 10 pages? I assume starting with that big buffer meant that this is less impactful to the comic and thus less stressful, but do you have breaks planned for yourself so you can re-up that backlog or do you intend to try to do it in-time with the comic? You're a powerhouse who I only ascribe to half the output of, but I'd love to know a little more about your backlog ethos. (When you have time of course!)

Heh, oh boy. The biggest bite got taken out of the buffer during Falst's intro arc. I had boarded something like a dozen pages when I decided I didn't like the direction they'd taken and I scrapped them back to blanks. I don't do this as a rule, but I could tell this one was a problem - I can't even remember why now, but there was something there that just wasn't working. I thus had a time-loss redoing those pages that made up the better part of a chapter, and my storyboard buffer shrank pretty significantly, though it's since recovered in a big way.

More of the buffer got worn down during the back half of the Zuurith arc and the Tynan fight, since every page was so complicated. Alongside the environmental fog and rain effects and the eight different kinds of glow, it was also a lot of characters on every page, and that increased the lineart and coloring time significantly. If I recall correctly, the buffer shrank to the low single digits a few times during that arc.

At some point I might take a break, but I kind of don't want to. I've kept up a solid pace this long and I don't wanna break my streak. I've been able to build the buffer back up to 20 pages before, but the problem is I tend to then take the following week or two off on the comic progress front because in my head I've made a good chunk of progress and thus should take a break. I'm getting better at incremental scene-by-scene progress, and I think chapter 20 is going to be good for rebuilding the buffer, because - spoiler alert - a lot of these scenes are one or two characters only, and most of them have fairly dark featureless backgrounds. I suspect I'll be able to get a healthy headstart just working through this chapter. This was my reward to myself for constantly making the Tynan fight increasingly complicated and ridiculous, and it's honestly a breath of fresh air to make these pages so much simpler.

My rule for comic-making is set a pace you can keep up. If you need to take a break, that's fine - my own unwillingness to do so is a me thing I'm working through. not a policy to emulate. I've been able to keep this up for three years with minimal buffer-loss, and as the story progresses my own art gets better and faster, making it easier for me to maintain this pace. That's why I made sure to start with such a hefty buffer - to give myself time to pick up speed and get better, time to have the occasional crash-and-burn week or even month where nothing gets done, and time to rewrite things that were being problems. Basically, the buffer is 100% working as intended so far, because all of those things have happened at least once.

The math is pretty favorable. With a three-page-a-week upload schedule, if I can finish three pages in under a week I'm guaranteed to keep the buffer going. At peak performance I can do five or six pages in one day, though that's dependent on complexity and that pace isn't sustainable for long - but of course it doesn't have to be, because that buys me two weeks to recover and do all the other stuff I couldn't do during the hellride. The block of pages I'm going to color tonight is five pages, which will buy me nearly two weeks. I lined and shaded those five pages on Friday, and I'd blocked out the backgrounds for this whole scene and the following one in one afternoon the previous week. It's not hellride-pace because it doesn't have to be, but if I needed to push it I could buy myself a week in under a day. Because of this, rebuilding the buffer back up to 20+ is a lower priority than keeping a steady pace that won't hurt my drawing hand or my writing brain.

But if I take too big of a hit I'll announce a two-week break or something. I have things arranged so hopefully I never have to, but ya never know, and it's important to be okay with taking the occasional unexpected hit!