Week 155! (Patreon)

THIS MARKS PAYMENT FOR THE WEEK OF 7/30-8/5.

Ugh, well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I finally had to make a late update. I was even dreading this far in advance months ago, knowing that August needing three updates would probably fuck me over in terms of the buffer, and it sure did do that. I'm really sorry this is late, ever since I started back up, Patreon is supposed to be the place to get early updates, but things finally caught up and the old happenstance happened again. Really, really badly want to try and get on track this next month, but this month's updates will require another quick stick-figure placeholder sketch for September's first page as the other image update. Work will pretty much be non-stop from how I was these past few weeks, but we'll see, basically dangling on the edge right now in terms of this. I also have to make a rather important, dire announcement after the rest of the paid updates for this month, but that's for tomorrow.

As for this page itself, it's page 395, and was supposed to go up yesterday on the 29th. I do actually have a fair amount of background and inspiration behind this scene, which I wanna share with you all since this particular scene has been in my mind for a long time now and really has been the 'point' that this arc has been leading to. 

Firstly, this scene of Campy sitting in front of a sepia-toned film projection is directly inspired by the PS1 RPG Xenogears, in which the main character also goes inside his own head and sees a younger version of himself in a black void watching memories on a screen. Xenogears helped inspire a decent amount of this mental mindscape stuff in the first place alongside Persona and basic Jungian psychology, but that specific scene stuck out the most, and I always wanted to draw direct homage to it with Campy.

Secondly, if it's not obvious (since it has been a while), those symbols are the same symbols that we've seen Campy has written down before, inside his notebook containing his epic poem Enes the Sparrow. We saw "recently" that, upon waking, Campy immediately writes prose in that notebook, but it either is or becomes those symbols. This page explains where he was getting those symbols from: this mysterious and unsettling place inside his mind, where he seems to be in a trance. It also reveals a little more about what Enes the Sparrow actually is, raising new questions that'll be answered later as well. (And yes, the messages on the screen all say real things, but no, they're not decodable since you need the key to do so and I'm still not releasing it.)

Finally, well, just the minor changes from the script/sketch I put up earlier. The "crazy stuff" that was supposed to be on the screen didn't actually turn out crazy at all. Originally I was going to have Kale walking down a corridor we've never seen before, but I didn't have time to design this corridor, since it'd be important later. So, instead, I have Kale shouting at someone indignantly in a scene that will happen far into the future (which in itself I guess is a bit of a spoiler as to what Campy's deal is here, too). There's also a slight bit of someone else in the panel after that, the person Kale's yelling at, who has appeared in the comic before! But their identity will remain a mystery for the moment. Basically, someday in the future, that pose of Kale's will be repeated (hopefully way better drawn), so something to keep in the back of your memory.

That's it for now, the other three updates will happen tomorrow, as well as that important announcement.