Hello friends, I hope this newsletter finds you well. One of the most challenging parts of this journey is maintaining consistency. Not just the act of making Sessions, but of promoting it to new people, and more importantly staying connected with you, dear reader. These old bones have found a bit of a rhythm though. The site & patreon, reddit & discord, bluesky and twitter; I’ve got a spreadsheet to make sure I’m keeping on top of each platform. Taking a break kills that rhythm and I’ve been procrastinating all day… until now. So what has this old skeleton been doing?

World Building

Reading and watching the masters and taking notes. Two movies in particular: The Triplets of Belleville and Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. Triplets is one of the most beautiful animated movies, so much that it’s almost too much to take in. I get frantic like I must not be working hard enough if this masterpiece exists! I was struck this time by the beautiful overhead shots of interiors in the film, and will remember to incorporate that POV.

As for Miyazaki, is there anything to take from him? A million things. The moments of seemingly consequential ambience, how he lets a shot linger rather than force the plot along at a breakneck pace. The way so many characters exist in a grey area. Lady Eboshi from Princess Mononoke is one example, or the pirates in Laputa. 

I hope the Seven Deadlies exist in a whole spectrum of greys from dark to light by the end of this story and that you feel a warmth for some if not all of them.

As for reading, I love the How To Think When Your Draw books by the Etherington Brothers. They usually include a chapter on world building and these books are like my reference encyclopedia for all the minutiae of people’s lives. They’ll have whole pages on drawing food or the mechanics of how things break. Some of the sketches in this week’s newsletter are from that reference material, things that will make the 90s a more real and understandable place for you: jars of coins saved up for the laundromat, pages of the Sunday edition of the New York Times strewn about a sun drenched living room. Moving boxes, because this house is newly occupied and we all know that some boxes never get unpacked. And books! College kids in the 90s had to lug them around on trains and scatter them around their bedrooms with cups of coffee dripping onto their pages.

I hope this world comes to life for you, and it becomes a place full of love and lust between our characters.

Be good to yourself,

Deaddie