Today we published Princess Pricklepants Presents issue no. 8: Count Hogula Part II (we forgot we needed a title until it was too late). In case you missed it, here it is:
We didn’t go into the details of the previous comic since it was a little less exciting art-wise, and seemed pretty straightforward. It was mostly prep to get us to this comic.
Since Bat-Hog entered the graveyard Hogula is in, we got to make everything Goreyesque, which is good. We’re not great with the comic styling we were using in the previous comic, and don’t especially like it, so we were very happy to escape to this. Also coloring is hard, so all black-and-white is nice, except shading with crosshatching is harder than coloring, so darn.
The highly hatched hog-rocket landing generally pleased us. We fiddled with it a lot, and would have fiddled more only at some point you just have to stop. It doesn’t quite draw the eye to tell the story of the landing as much as we’d like, but we’re picky. Bat-hog’s determined walk through the bleak snowy graveyard towards the crypt, the tombstones, the crypt in the distance, these we like. In the layout we bled the two top panels together to give some sense of motion.
A dramatic meeting. We worked on each expression for a good while to get a very serious, stern Bat-Hog. Empty white holes in a mask are nice and easy for making expressions. We made a much more mysterious Hogula that invited multiple readings. Bat-Hog’s quills are a lot more varied than Hogula’s since he just crashed in a Hog-Rocket. The conceit for the bottom panels gets set up here, writ small.
We put a tiny message in here about the shadows, because it’s not how shadows work. We fiddled a while, reached a point where we could live with the wrongness, and left a confessional note. Nice dramatic left panel, I think. We added the bats late, but once we thought of it, they really helped things pop.
Bat-Hog’s quills will never settle until crime has ended. The shadows again, let’s not talk about those. We played up the mirrored Bat-Hog and Hogula, each with their long dark cape/cloaks, their bats, and other similarities for the comic, but now we really want to make a vampire Batman just to test things out some more.
We left things hanging with poor Hogula complaining about suffering unfair prejudice by the living, next week we will fill in more, so stay tuned.
This is the intro comic boldly going where no hedgehog comic has gone before. While this particular issue has some Star Trek influence, now that we’re through this intro comic, the goal is to be more akin to Muppets in Space, the single greatest sci-fi show ever produced. Every real sci-fi fan knows in their heart that the Muppets in Space Star Wars episode was the most ambitious crossover in history.
We think this one came together pretty well. We’re back to the view screen from the beginning, the crew is all together save the robot, and we have some new mysterious bits like the hedgehog-esque shuttle. The robot is flying the shuttle, hence not in the scene.
The Pleasantries of Princess Pricklepants 