Aaand there it goes.

A short moment of triumph, followed by another exemplary demonstration of this universe’s cruelty. But we all knew this moment of joy couldn’t last, so the question now is: How’s Fris going to handle this most recent development?

Will he continue to show defiance in the face of boundless misery? Will he despair and give in to hopelessness? Or will he just curse out the gods again and carry on in his quest of becoming the angriest ryka alive?

Submit your predictions in the comments below for a chance to win invaluable bragging rights within this community once the next page comes ‘round!

Website-Exclusive Author’s Note:

This one’s… alright, I guess?

This page was my first attempt to truly make the actions presented within the comic a lot more dynamic and interesting. This has become a focus because, for a while now, most AAiS pages have shown us such dramatic scenes such as:

• Fris walking around from the side
• Fris walking around from the back
• Fris standing around and doing something from the front
• Fris standing around and doing something from the side

Sure, you can find quite a few exceptions to the tropes above within the 21 pages of AAiS that are out now, but not enough. Even worse, despite the above styles of panels sound like they’d be pretty easy to draw, they actually take a lot more time to complete than you’d think.

The biggest reason for that is me having developed this big knack for drawing either large portions or all of Fris’s body within a single panel. Seriously, if you take a look back, you’ll find that most of my panels are zoomed out way further than they’d need to be, and as a result, you not only lose a lot of dynamism and focus, but I also hand myself a lot more work for a result that looks markedly worse, because – for obvious reasons – constructing and drawing a full body takes a lot more time than just drawing a small section of the body.

In that sense, panels 1 and 2 are both pretty decent. The focus is on the face, and the depth-of-field-effect adds some nice dynamism. In panel 3, however, I completely lost track of my goal and went back to drawing almost all of Fris. Then, in panels 5 and 6, while I am zoomed in decently enough, I also drew both panels from a perfect side view for some reason, pretty much annihilating any and all dynamism that the actions could otherwise have had.

Still, though, I think the end result isn’t awful. Sure, the page is worse than what I realistically could have done in the same time frame, and in a few months, I’ll undoubtedly be lambasting myself for having been as bad at doing visual arts as I currently am, but I think I’m happy enough for now. And that’s nice.

— AP