Week 107! (Patreon)

This panel comes from the very first comic of the New Canon, 001 - New Beginnings, released on January 28, 2008.

I would like to just say that holy crap the first page looks atrocious. According to the Notes underneath I apparently thought it sucked even back then, but it's only that much worse for me to look at it over 8 years later. Like it also says in the Notes, it was one of the very first things I had ever drawn with a digital tablet (a Graphire3 at the time), and it really shows with the horrendously shaky and crooked lines on the characters, Kale especially. Beyond that though comes the other terrible things in that page, like the incorrect attempts at perspective, the fun house-looking windows on the school, the absolute fear of drawing an actual horizon and thus shoving huge mountains in the background to prevent showing an empty sky. The random students in the fifth panel look okay, at least compared to Kale, but otherwise yeesh. It's the kind of quality that makes a person want to go back and totally redraw everything... but I won't and probably never will, because that would just occupy more time and go backwards again, nevermind the weird quality jump doing that eventually creates between pages, as evidenced when other webcomics have done it.

Beyond the art quality, though... I mean, it's the first page of the New (current) Canon and there's not a huge amount to it beyond establishing Kale's situation. Honestly, looking back, I think the Old Canon had a better first page, but the first arc of the New Canon was a bit "rushed" in terms of establishing things so I didn't retread old ground, basically, since the pacing in the Old Canon was very slow and I wanted this stuff out of the way to get to the proper newer stuff.

But oh well. This redraw at least can demonstrate how incredibly improved I've become since then, more than any of these other redraws I've been doing (not to say that I'm all that great now, just that it's a huge leap relatively).