1-15 – Introductions, Part I
Sunday, February 25th, 2007– Commentary –
Craig: Wow, we caught some flak for this page. I got a lot of slightly impolite emails telling me that it wasn’t believable that Lucky was a girl.
J.D.: However, every single sketch that you did from the very beginning included Lucky’s full figure under the clothes.
Craig: When I draw a character, I first start by drawing the figure without any clothes or hair. It looks kind of like a mannequin. Every real-world picture of Lucky that I drew included her… er… femininity. But then I was careful to put her in positions and clothing that would mask her gender. I thought it would be fun to pull a little “reveal” in the first chapter.
J.D.: Originally, we weren’t planning on revealing the truth about Lucky until the last chapter. But then we wanted to include more of the real-life interactions between the players, so we moved the reveal forward.
Craig: Yep. The story originally was going to be set almost exclusively in the dungeon. Readers who recall the original six pages note that we never showed any of the players except Leon, and that was only for one panel. But when we stepped back and decided to tell the story in this format —
J.D.: — more slowly —
Craig: — the story grew branches and roots into the real world — or Earth realm —
J.D.: — and now we have the time to develop it fully. And craft a better story for the effort, I think.
Craig: So we decided to have our fun with Lucky’s gender, but we revealed much sooner. Really, to those who complained that Lucky “grew breasts” in this page, I can only say that it is my poor and slowly developing art talent that is to blame, not an intentional misrepresentation of Lucky’s figure in the prior pages.
Craig: And then there’s the poster. 🙂
J.D.: Yes! The “Richard III” poster in the background is actually a tongue-in-cheek homage/spoof of a theatre director a friend of ours had in grad school.
Craig: I rendered her on the poster. She’s the one in the snow whose breath you can see. Because it’s cold.
J.D.: In the winter of their discontent.
Craig: Because the theatre director assumed Shakespeare was being COMPLETELY LITERAL when he had Gloucester say “Now is the winter of our discontent, made summer by this sun of York.”
J.D.: Apparently he didn’t bother to read the next phrase of the play.
Craig: He actually instructed our friend to shiver and act as though she were cold, because obviously it must have been winter.
J.D.: We don’t talk about this in front of her.
Craig: No. She gets the shakes and her eye starts twiching. She gets a little crazy remembering that director.
February 25th, 2007 at 5:02 am
Funniest thing in this page is Aarons last comment: “Boyfriend?”. Kate sure is very aggressive and self-confident. 🙂
February 27th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Hehe well i wasnt one of those impolite emailers, i thought it was a nice surprice. Im only wondering how girls can get that much hair under a cap. 😛
Ow and you already knew that Lucky was a girl after the panel of that party.
February 28th, 2007 at 11:25 am
How did you know after the club scene? Lucky didn’t go to Zampona. After I first read this particular strip, I went back through all of the others looking for “the signs” and I must say that there wasn’t any previous evidence in either the dialog or the art (I didn’t re-read each of the commentaries).
While it may be that there was every intention of Lucky being female from the beginning, the interpretations are that Lucky would have been male. For example, look at 1-3. Picking your opposite gender but still using your name (which you would associate with your gender) is a little…..ummmm….odd. Granted, the name Lucky is gender neutral, but even someone named Jamie would associate their name with their own gender first and the opposite gender second (in my opinion).
Other questionable facts: In 1-2, the final panel should show a little more “shape” even given the bulky clothes. 1-4 would show more “shadow” in the face forward shots (more like what is in 1-7). 1-8 should definately have show some shape in the clear side shot.
Am I upset about it? No. Did I e-mail? No. I’m just calling “Bluff”.
Layne
February 28th, 2007 at 11:49 am
It *is* possible for the figure in any of the earlier strips to be female – even the same individual than the one in 1-15, I know females who can make a “change of shape” like that – but it is just a bit strange. Not so much the way the earlier Lucky looks but the way everything about her shouts ‘girl’ in 1-15…
February 28th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Wasnt the girl on the left her? thought that she was Lucky 🙂
March 5th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I think that girl on the left was supposed to be Lucky. Which brings logic-error in scene. If Kate notices Aaron at that point she must have noticed Lucky too (Lucky was dancing with Aaron), in which case her comment about “you have got to meet my roommate” is pretty invalid. That makes this girl on the left unlikely to be Lucky, but based on the comments here she should have been Lucky.