"Same as the old boss."

Title clearly inspired by The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."

Oookay, so, there's a variety of reasons why I don't intend to do Northern Nights as a comic. Some are time related (the backgrounds take for-ev-er). Some are practical (let's face it, a number of my characters -- and that's including some of the primaries -- do not lend themselves to being drawn over and over and over again). Some are simply matters of preference, momentum, and my own stubborness (Northern Nights was conceived first as a written work and its development has always had that format in mind).

All that being said, a little over a month ago I was browsing through a number of online comics. I was inspired. Not to restructure Northern Nights and make it a comic, but to use the comic format as a means of exploring scenes, relationships, etc. And, so, I give you Northern Nights vignettes.

No dialogue for this one -- it'd have altered the flow too much. However, to place the whole thing in context: Snowy and Rsay (one of the Elders and the wolf in the first panel) have had a disagreement of sufficient scope that Snowy sought out Ng'rea for support. Ng'rea, having been in Nondes Rial since before the pack moved in, has a fair amount of knowledge regarding historic pack politics and policy. And what she knows would bolster Snowy's side of the argument. With Chech's help, Snowy manages to work out an...ah...arrangement with Ng'rea. So, the next time Rsay opens his mouth on the subject, well, the results are plain to see.

This was fun. It's not the strongest page layout I've done, but it does its job well enough.

ArtRage used for figuring out panel layout and all that composition thumbnail-ing jazz, plus the paper texture. Photoshop for everything else. Started early November. Finished today. Working steady throughout. Oh, and another reason not to do Northern Nights as a comic: size. The original file size for this is huge. This is presented at something like 12.5% the working size. The Photoshop file itself is my largest yet, topping out at some 1.20 gigabytes. This is what I get for working at a high screen resolution. Still, so very worth it.

(A larger version of that last panel is also going to be uploaded, so not all the details are eaten.)