Palace in the Sky Webcomic News

Comic title: Last Resort
Comic URL: http://www.lastres0rt.com
Creator: Rachel Keslensky
Genre: Cyberpunk / Furry

1) What is your comic about?

Last Resort is a show within a show — the comic goes through the lives of the players, staff and various bystanders behind the scenes of the galaxy’s hottest new reality show, where a dozen condemned criminals are playing for their freedom if they can just survive to the end of the broadcast season. The four volunteers added to the mix are playing for their own gain as well, but for now, they just have to work with the few they can trust and hope to get out alive.

2) How did you get started making webcomics?

Throughout high school, I’d been writing fan fiction as well as original novels — and while I was receiving great reviews, something about writing novels just lost its appeal to me; thousands of people write novels, but very few novels ever rise to the surface. Also, while I liked writing stories, I never liked READING other people’s stories, especially compared to comic books. Webcomics provided an opportunity to tell the stories I wanted to tell, without the hurdles that reading a novel might provide to the average reader, and since I wanted to make a living off of my artwork anyway, it seemed a perfect fit.

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

A large part of my mindset going into starting [i]Last Resort[/i] is that I knew if I was going to make this webcomic, I needed to be in it for the long haul; none of the webcomics that I liked / considered popular had been around for less than five years, which was a clue to me that I should plan on making a comic for at least that long. By the five-year mark I expect that not only will I still be working on the comic, but it will also becoming more mainstream and popular enough that I can feature my work at bigger conventions and start profiting from book sales.

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

Jigsaw Forte used to travel around the galaxy as a violinist for the Araeli Orchestra (who managed to woo her out of graduate school) before the incident that spurred her to leave and head for Last Resort. Jigsaw has her own personal reasons for coming to Last Resort, however; the clues are all there, so a clever reader can figure out the rest.

5) Who is your favorite secondary character and why?

That’s hard to answer, especially since Last Resort has far more characters than the average story seems to. Within the main cast, Jason and Daisy seem to jockey for top position, depending on the situation; Adharia and White Noise seem to get their turns in the spotlight every now and then as well. Among the extended cast, Cypher sticks out the most.

6) What is your favorite comic page?

I don’t have a distinct favorite — “any page from six months ago that I can still stand” tends to be the best answer. The pages with Slick or White Noise in them seem to age the best.

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

[SPOILER!]

Well,
I can’t wait to finish the second episode (where the players get to take on a
cadre of Galaxy Girl Scouts) just so finally I can show off some of the action
and violence that I’ve been promising up to this point, in addition to having
enough pages for my first anthology. The other plot that’s really being hashed
out in my head at this point is when they take on the cult of Gabriel, especially
when things don’t go as planned…

[END SPOILER!]

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

I thought I had a tutorial around here somewhere… the simplest explanation is that I sketch and ink the pages digitally in Illustrator, color them with Paint Shop Pro, and finally go into Photoshop Elements for lettering, sound effects, and any other finishing touches. Most of the work is done while coloring it — I use several layers for shading, atmospheric effects, and keeping the outlines as crisp as the colors.

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

Everything, really. I realize that lots of folks like my art and my writing and would probably be happy enough keeping all of that just the way it is, but for me, my webcomic is a laboratory for the improvement of all my skills; not just my writing or my artwork, but also my visual storytelling as well. Lately I’ve reached the point where the art is somewhere I feel comfortable keeping it, but now my pages take longer because I’m tinkering more with the camera, page layouts, and environs now to make the world more immersive and engrossing than the average comic of talking heads. I’ll find my happy place with the comic eventually, but for now… I experiment, and that seems to be working quite well for me.

10) Okay, seriously… why furries?

Last Resort started out that way to begin with — wild centaurs, giant lizards, alien marsupials and all. I actually spent almost a month before starting to draw Last Resort deciding if I was willing to turn as many of the characters as possible into humans in order to make it more “acceptable” so people would be able to see past the big ears and tails and find the people inside, but in the end it just didn’t make sense to; the story didn’t feel right without these strange creatures. I realize people might not be able to see past the furry art style, but people used to say all the same things about Anime and Manga as well, so it’ll be a matter of time before people decide it doesn’t matter to them anymore.