Making Emrakul vs Squirrels (Patreon)

Since many of my newest patrons are here for the Emrakul vs Squirrels playmat, I thought it might be interesting to look back at the making of the comic that it is based on.

The original idea for the comic just came from thinking about how strange power and toughness are in Magic. Due to the constraint that players start with only 20 life, there is a relatively small range of power and toughness values that creatures can have. This leads to funny things, like a super powerful creature like Emrakul dying if she is blocked with just fifteen 1/1 creatures. I just had to think of what creature would be most fun to imagine taking Emrakul down. I'm pretty sure squirrels came to me fairly quickly.

I draw all of my comics in Photoshop, using a stylus pad made by Wacom that is about 15 years old. It works on my computer, but it is pretty buggy. When I draw, I start with a sketch using the color gray. These can be pretty detailed sometimes, but in this case I just had to set the composition of Emrakul and the mountains.

Once the sketch was done, I added a new layer to draw on in Photoshop, and then used a black color to ink my sketch. For this I had to consult closely with Emrakul artwork to get the right feel. To help convey Emrakul's size, I used a wide variety of line thicknesses to give more of a sense of depth. This is how it now looked.

To build the final comic, I was too lazy to draw Emrakul a second time. So I copied and pasted her, and then drew a third panel with the two Magic players:

After this, I added another layer for Emrakul's dialogue, and then I had to make some squirrels. I first sketched a bunch of squirrels in all sorts of positions, so I could choose the best ones to include in the comic.

Once I put everything together, the final comic that I posted on my website looked like this.

But that's not the end of the story. This comic went on to be really popular. This gave me the idea of making it into a poster, but to do this I really needed to add color. I was especially excited to color Emrakul because her colors are so vibrant.

Coloring takes a lot of steps. First I color all the base colors. Then I add highlights and shadows. This resulted in the following,

From here I added a second set of lines that are colored instead of black. This provides a feeling that some things are really far away (because there's more atmosphere between you and the thing), to help convey Emrakul's size. I finally added Emrakul's dialogue and the shaded speech bubbles. Here was the final poster. 

One thing you quickly learn when you make a comic about Magic is that Magic players always like to be right. So when they see the opportunity, they are always ready to tell you that you did something wrong. This comic was no different. Because it was so popular, I ended up getting a lot of corrections and complaints about it. These could roughly be grouped into about three different categories.

(1) Emrakul has annihilate 6, so the defending player will only have 9 squirrels left. I never understood this. Maybe the defender sacrificed 6 lands. Maybe the defender had 21 squirrels, and we're just seeing this after 6 squirrels were sacrificed.

(2) Squirrels don't fly. I guess the average squirrel in Magic doesn't fly, but flying squirrels are a thing. And anyway, maybe the defender had some enchantment or something to make his squirrels fly. He obviously couldn't block unless he did. Does everything need to be explained in every comic?

(3) Squirrels can't block because they're colored. This is a common mistake. A creature is a spell when it's on the stack, but once it resolves, it is no longer a spell. So it's perfectly fine for the squirrels to block.

But when ProxyGuy offered to make me a silly card based on this comic, dealing with the people from (3) gave me the idea for the flavor text.

You might also notice that for the Emrakul vs Squirrels playmat I slightly tweaked Emrakul's dialogue to mention that the squirrels are flying. This was to hopefully spare anyone who is using the playmat from having to get asked how squirrels are able to block a flying creature.

I hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes. Have a nice weekend!