Oh? OH! OH, WOOOOW!

Look at that! It was all just a dream! All of that story setup, all of those characters, all the suspense and all that emotional investment made worthless within the blink of an eye. Amazing. Simply amazing! With the release of this comic page, AP has, in a single stroke, marked the decline of his hackfraud writing career and spelled the beginning of a new era of wonderous prosperity and peaceful global dominance for the #APisOver faction, which promises to firmly stand in sharp contrast to the historically shitty releases of AAiS and the cruel insults they brought to the humbler authors of the world. What a joke…

Website-Exclusive Author’s Note:

Well, this page was a bit of an undertaking, to say the least.

When I first came up with the idea of writing a short dream sequence to introduce the theme of this story and the character of Fris ahead of the – admittedly – somewhat slow start of AAiS’s main arch, the need for a wake-up sequence became apparent. This entire post-dream sequence has been rummaging around my mind, my different hard drives and some of my thousands of rykani related Word documents for almost three years now, although very little of substance has changed since then. What I hadn’t thought of even once in all of those years, though, was to give Fris a slight redesign from his scuffed-up dream counterpart. Why the story required this redesign in the first place I won’t reveal just yet, but it took me quite a few days to come up with something that I was happy with. Now, though, we can finally appreciate a Fris redesigned and updated to fit the fragile needs of the modern audience:

His longer, messier head-Ploculli symbolize the entangled mind of the modern reader. The less prominent blue and purple Ploculli, as well as the more prominent dog tag, both now dangling around his neck on a simple black string, symbolize the loss of self in the modern consumer landscape. His redesigned, more subtle AR-Set symbolizes… something, I guess. Oh, and his new gun doesn’t only look fucking rad, but also has two barrels for double the railgun-dakka.

I’ve also been struggling with the color pallet of the scene quite a bit during the creation of this page. Since we’ve now left the darkness of Fris’s dream, I was finally forced to designate a final color scheme for Fris. (Yes, I wasn’t even fully sure about Fris’s Ploculli colors before starting this comic, that’s how little visual planning I managed to get done in the last three years before starting this series.) Finding the right shades of blue, red, and brown wasn’t easy, and I seriously regret not giving Fris a simpler three-color design, with either white, gray, or black as the base, right about now. Oh, well, at least it gives him some personality that contrasts nicely with the depressingly utilitarian design of his new surroundings.

I hope I can speed up the comic updates now that I’m done redesigning Fris and finding a fitting palette for this new environment we’re in. Of course, having a set pallet and design seemingly hasn’t prevented me from slipping from my schedule in the past, but I guess we’ll see pretty soon how things go from here on out.