Sigh. If you can’t trust double agents, who can you trust?
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After scrounging around countless museums in Europe, I finally managed to find and scan this much sought after page from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It was omitted from the official printing of the book for unknown reasons. Some say it was because Foxe was threatened by the Royals, who didn’t want their secret “Bastard of Britain” to become known to the public. Others think the page was omitted simply because it didn’t fit very well with the theme of the Book of Martyrs. Both reasons seem to have a bit of truth to them.
Mark your calendars, dear readers! March 27th is our one year anniversary! It’s hard for us to believe, but it’s already been a year since James shared his crazy little idea with the internet and set in motion one of the coolest projects I’ve ever had the chance to work on.
So, what better day to relaunch The Continuum comics than our anniversary? As you may know, the Daikaiju character is up next. Just to whet your appetite, here’s the first establishing panel of the Daikaiju’s introduction, which begins in the Amazon rainforest, July 1956…
We’re so excited to get this beast back up and running! Stay tuned for more.
For page 2, I based the entire layout on various triangular compositions positioned symmetrically all the way down the page. The reason behind this was to emphasize the sisters as a powerful trio – ie. the “rule of three” as it’s known in Wicca (ie. “three fold law,” “law of return”). I’ve heard that some people can see a skull in this layout, and as much as I’d like to take credit for that, it was completely by accident.
And, just a reminder, Kevin Johnson did the inks. I did the pencils and the colors.
Right at the beginning of thumbnailing page three, I got the idea to mark the traumatic occasion of the sisters’ ritual by laying the panels out within a pentagram. The Undead intro is one of the intros that James and I officially designated to be “experimental” in terms of visual style, so I couldn’t resist the chance to try a layout like this. Initially it seemed like a good idea to make it a two-page spread…
…but ultimately I decided on scrunching it into one page because I didn’t want the crucial elements of the scene to end up on the crease in the printed version.
In the following stages, note the return of the triangle compositions, how Kevin improved upon my cartoonish eyeballs in the bottom three panels, and the slight tweaking and skewing of the whole page in the final two color versions. Symmetry felt very important to maintain in the first three pages of this story.
My comics teacher suggested that I go back into this page and add some of the tree branchery as a sort of border, so that the whole comic is unified by the tree theme. Initially when I made this page, though, the intention behind excluding the branch borders was that this page needed to stand out from the others because of the traumatic event. Though, now I do think it could benefit from including some of that tree border. I may go back to this and adding some branches creeping in at the edges of the page.
