Up Close and Personal

Up Close and Personal

Posted by Brian • May 11, 2017

Original Release Date: September 5, 2012

This page (and the next) took an extensive amount of time to draw, due to the large number of bodies involved. I wish I had put the two battling sides more nose-to-nose in panel four, so the guys in the foreground weren't cut off by the sides of the panel so much. The ninja on panel four are a bit cut off, as well. The actual panel compositions are cool; I just should have done a better job of planning them out, first. I got too far in and felt like I couldn't go back and re-do the whole thing due to time constraints.

Other than that, just a lot of tension-building stuff going on here. I hope it's effective. We are, after all, building up to the long-awaited showdown between the Ninja Union and the Hired Goon Association. As soon as I knew they would be at odds in this volume, I knew I wanted a huge, Lord of the Rings-style brawl like this between the two sides, where they first line up and then charge each other and have a massive battle.

I mentioned a few pages back that I wanted the hired goon frontlines to be made up partly of goons from pop culture, like Imperial Stormtroopers, Foot Soldiers, and so on. It's an homage, and it's obviously supposed to be funny, but any time I do something like this, I have an irrational fear that people will call me out on a lack of creativity. It has never happened, but the fear persists, even today.