Palace in the Sky Webcomic News

Hey readers! Once weekly Palace in the Sky will be posting interview questions answered by all our members here on the blog. Feel free to ask questions or comment here on our community blog! First up in the round of interviews is RekKa of SkyFall.

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Comic title: SkyFall
Comic URL: http://www.skyfallmanga.com/
Creator(s): RekKa
Genre: Fantasy

1) What is your comic about?

Basically, it’s a fantasy adventure about six mysterious, and powerful devices that, when activated, allow their bearers to directly control the gods. Naturally, such extraordinary power isn’t really meant to be used, so there are several individuals who would rather destroy the devices than use them. On a more character-sized scale, I attempt to explore different motivations for the use of power, both noble and not… and how they interact when brought together.

2) How did you get started making webcomics?

My friend’s mom and my mom got together and said, “Hey! You two should make a comic book.” And we did. Naturally, the best medium for getting it out in the world was the web, so that’s where we put it.

3) Five years from now, what do you see your comic becoming? Will it be over? Will it have grown larger?

Oh, it’ll be over. I hope to finish it sometime in 2010 or so. By then I will have started a new project, and will probably be halfway done with that one… I hope people will still read SkyFall, though.

4) Tell us about your main character. What are his/her motivations? How did he/she join up with your other characters and why?

Hana is my main character. Basically, she’s an embittered war veteran who turned mercenary to reconcile her racial differences with the people who destroyed her home life. She’s an angry, disagreeable person… but deep down, she just hasn’t dealt with the pain from her youth. Because of her anger and short-sightedness, she’s relatively easy to manipulate, which brings her into the story. Two of my other characters hire her because she owns something they want… and later she gets whisked away halfway across the continent for the same reason by another character. To begin with she really doesn’t have much of an awareness or motivation to use the power she has, but later she grows into her own ideas about what needs to happen, and takes control of her own destiny.

5) Who is your favorite secondary character and why?

Nesshin, my red-headed mage. Originally he was based off of me, but he’s really grown into his own, very different character. He’s easy to write for, and has a lot of room to grow. Also, I’ve probably written the most extensive back-story for him… so that gives him depth in my mind. Lately though, Tanoshii has started to grow on me…

6) What is your favorite comic page?

Oh gosh, probably either Episode 12, Page 5 for the yawning panel, or Episode 11, Page 6 for Hana’s “I thought it tasted kind of bitter” line.

7) Is there a storyline you’re really looking forward to? What is it about? Give us a spoiler warning if necessary!

There’s a scene in a few chapters where Nesshin has been taken hostage by Kiyami and Thenya which should be fun. I’m looking forward to writting some… relatively witty banter. Too bad I haven’t written it yet or I’d give more details.

8 ) Can you give us a short explanation on how you make your pages? If you have a tutorial or anything, please link it.

• Step 1: Script. Pretty self-explanitory. Text blocking of pages and panels. Highly variable on the amount of time it takes to do this step.
• Step 2: Draw. I have a printed guide page on card stock that I do my penciling on that shows me where the edges, bleed, and live zones are on my page so that I don’t have to measure it out every time. I pencil out the frames and then do a fairly clean pencil layer. This step generally takes me about 2 – 3 hours depending on how closely I’m watching the TV.
• Step 3: Ink. I use pens (Staedtler Pigment Liners, usually the 03) to ink the page on paper, then erase the pencil, then scan. The only thing I don’t ink is the borders to the panels. This step usually takes less than an hour.
• Step 4: Tone. After scanning and cleaning up the inked image, I lay down digital borders and tones. Basically, I have an archive of tones that I’ve scanned in and then use Photoshop to apply them. Basic technique for that is to have one layer set to multiply with a flat color (usually black for whatever reason) with a tone on a layer mask above that one (alt+click between the layers). This allows me to easily “color in” the tones without dealing with actual masks or erasing the tone. This step used to take me a long time, but I’ve gotten it to the point where this step only takes about an hour.
• Step 5: Upload. Flatten, save, upload to web.

9) Be your own critic! When it comes to your comic, what are you looking to improve upon?

I’ve never been much of a writer… so creating the story itself and portraying it in an understandable way has been a major difficulty. I think I picked a really epic story to start off with… and giving it scale while treating the characters with due respect has been a difficult balance. I think my writing has improved as I’ve moved the story along, but there are a lot of things that have already been produced that I can’t go back and change.

Also, while I feel generally comfortable in my artistic ability and how that has improved already… I feel that I still lack in the backgrounds department. I’ve found I do better with backgrounds when they’re in color… but b/w and tone has been… more difficult for some reason. Anyway, backgrounds and extreme camera angles are something I still need to work on.

10) Personal Question! With SkyFall drawing to a close in the next few years, what’s your plan for the future?

I plan on branching out into the realm of color comics and doing a Japanese mythological fantasy based on the “Four Gods”: Suzaku, Seiryuu, Byakko, and Genbu. It’ll be told completely in the first person, which is something I haven’t seen terribly much of in webcomics. I currently have 9 chapters of script and a handful of character designs… I’m really excited to get started on it and use everything I’ve learned from doing SkyFall. Perhaps once I get closer to releasing it I’ll do some blogs about it… >.>

Well, that was fun.

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And there you have it folks! Any questions for RekKa? Please take a second to register (yes, we must keep the spam down) here and post them for her to answer!