City of Heroes Invasion Issue 3
In Issue 2 I began experimenting with Photo Shop to assemble my images in a desired way. In Issue 3 I took this concept further and worked to apply multiple filters and effects to not only achieve certain effects, but also make the images look uniform and part of a whole. I also began delving more deeply into image manipulation. You can see a good example of my efforts on the cover. I designed the cover specifically to be homage to the fighting genre of video games. See when you select the characters to fight with, you would typically see a screen with Character A on the left facing Character B on the right with some version of the word "VERSUS" between the two of them.
The first five pages are entirely visually pre-roll as I establish the set up of the fight between Torroes Prime and Wicked Blue. I used these pages up to set up Wicked Blue and Torroes as being roughly equal to one another, with one being stronger and the other being faster. One being more experienced while the other is better trained. Equal, but not the same.
The first frame of page 7, the opening panel of the fight shows the advancement of my skills in using Photo Shop to assemble the images. Wicked Blue, Torroes Prime, The impact effect on Torroes's chest, the motion path of Wicked Blue's arm and the "Thump" sound effect are each separate images from one another. I applied a minor blur effect on Torroes to show him in motion.
Wicked Blue's speech patterns early in this issue were written deliberately to be mechanical and draw a line of reference to the Cy-tor in the previous issue. I figured it was a good way to show that Wicked Blue is being controlled.
Panel 2 is an example of photo shopping that I'm fairly proud of. Remember in the production notes for issue 2, I mentioned that using a blur effect is more difficult than it sounds like. You'll notice in this frame I've learned a new way to deal with. What I did is made 2 copies of Torroes' leg, and applied the blur effect to one copy and then played with the transparency a little bit. The end result is to show a great deal of motion without losing so much detail as to be unable to tell what it object is any more. A far more extreme version of this trick can be seen on panel 1 of page 17.
About the only part of this issue that I'm genuinely disappointed in is the full page spread of the fight between Wicked Blue and Torroes Prime on page 24. I had originally intended to make it a much more intense mural starting at the top left and proceeding down to the lower right with a series of images of Wicked Blue and Torroes Prime fighting, punching, blocking and dodging one another with the images starting at just barely visible in the upper left to fully visible in the bottom right. This endeavor proved to be beyond my skills at the time and I was forced to settle for what I have in the finished issue.