Inconceivable Triumph – Chapter 8, Act 3, Strip 14

As you can see I didn’t attempt to illustrate the final, climactic battle between our (interim) heroes and the ultimate mechanical monster of doom in any great detail, with just a little more detail provided in the narration.

It’s not like I had any problem envisioning said ultimate mechanical monster. On the contrary – it needed to be the biggest and meanest robot around, and there aren’t many robots who could challenge Bender Bending Rodriguez for the crown of the meanest robot in fiction. And of course that’s not on the basis of his bodycount, which pales in comparison to the kind of slaughter some of his fellow fictional robots have produced. No, it’s the sheer amount of just basic, trivial, every-day unpleasantness that gives Bender his place on the bottom rung. With the meanness issue decided, it just required scaling him up to become the biggest robot on top of the meanest, and that’s not really difficult – the square-cube law has rarely ever successfully obstructed the willing suspension of disbelief of anybody. It’s just too abstract, I’d venture.

No, the reason for the non-illustration of this conflict lay elsewhere and was two-fold: for one thing it would have been rather repetitive and stolen too much of the protagonists’ thunder in favor of mere supporting characters. And for the other thing, I just wasn’t capable of visualizing what the twins would actually look like when going to the extreme. From the basis of the costumes I had already shown them wearing, I just couldn’t extrapolate results that were not only one but two order of magnitude above that. And even if I had been able to visualize it, actually putting it to (virtual) paper would still have been another thing – and a thing that would have been bound to take a whole lot of effort and time, given the sheer amount of bows, lace, sparkles, sprinkles, taffeta, rainbow colors, teddy bears, hearts, crystals and all such things involved.

And that’s why I rather wimped out and erased the scene not only from the plot but also from the Queen’s memory, since she couldn’t possibly have found the right words to describe what I couldn’t even clearly visualize.

Plus, the main point of the whole thing is Latho making his move, anyway. And so it does in the final panel. Predictably, the movement is of the wriggling variety. ._.

More on Monday.

2 Replies to “Inconceivable Triumph – Chapter 8, Act 3, Strip 14”

  1. I expected the final outfits to have two big Censor Bars (TM) with mosaics around various phallus-like shapes just barely sticking out indicating whatever the getup was it was too big to be fully censored even by Censor Bars (TM). The panel that followed wouldn’t even need to be changed dialog-wise.

    1. Yeah, that’s the other aspect – if I had gone to the effort actually drawing the twins’ ultimate form, I would likely have had to cover most of the picture up before publication. Naturally, that only further eroded my motivation. XD

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