On the exchange between Valentin and Jezebel, following the protest attack and Dariya’s death
The Valentin/Jezebel scene we recently came out of was not the first meeting of these two characters, as eagle-eyed readers know, but it is their first significant exchange even though it arrives so near the end of the serial. We always knew this scene was coming, but its tone changed significantly as we discovered more and more about the two.
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On the arrival of Valentin into the story, and creating a split-scene conversation
I’m very pleased that not only did the Nadia/Valentin interlude come in at a tight three pages, but also that those three pages lined up within the same week of updates. Coordinating page content with upload dates is hard to do, and most of the times (like this week) when it happens, it’s strictly coincidental.
Designing and shooting these two scenes was an opportunity to switch up our routines, as much on the page as on the set. Placing Nadia outside in the night and Valentin inside his lair naturally split the images into deep blues (for her) and complex reds (for him), an aesthetic separation that mirrors both their physical distance and character differences. Having a conversation over radio provided some new flexibility in bubble placement and which lines could be positioned in which frames, something that’s not as easy to tweak with both characters in photo (or even in the same physical space). I hope that the crackly radio text bubbles read distinctly from the standard text bubbles, it’s an experimental approach that may or may not work for the standard reader.
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