Aurora Fandub

the "official" tumblr of the fandub for @comicaurora. please help i have no idea how to use tumblr

[aurorafandub]

An unfortunate update

I would have posted this at the same time as Twitter, but Tumblr decided I wasn’t allowed to post for a couple days.

Thank you all for your support. I will continue to interact with @comicaurora​ and fandom-related posts, but otherwise, this account will be going dormant. I hope one day I can return.

-Canine

[concreteafterrain]

@comicaurora

I Did A Fanart!

(one has transparent lines)

[aurorafandub]

The icon for the Discord Server! Fantastic!

[concreteafterrain]

@comicaurora

I Did A Fanart!

(one has transparent lines)

[aurorafandub]

The icon for the Discord Server! Fantastic!

[thecraftingrat]

Ok so, I found (aka rediscovered) this other watercolour redraw scene I did from @comicaurora wonderful webcomic over the summer…

As for my reasons for watercolouring this particular scene…. uh… anatomy practice, I guess? Showing appreciation for the dope-ass dragon ‘tattoo’ on his torso? The dramatic background cliff? Expressing my admiration for the  hubristic hot mess of sorcerer/mad scientist that is Erin?

Probably the last one, let’s be honest here.

(why yes, those two floofy blobs in the top corner are supposed Kendal and Alinua)

[aurorafandub]

👀👀

[yurious-george]

@comicaurora panel repaint that got away from me

[aurorafandub]

Absolutely excellent. Saw its development in the discord streams, and its outcome is great!

[comicaurora]

Are you likely to show up on discord and do q&a sessions again, or has that era passed? (And can we rename your role in the fan server to I Made the Comic?)

Huh, that could be a good idea. I’ve kinda been in the Head Down Make Progress mode and genuinely forgot that was a thing I could do. I also kinda didn’t want to pop in and disrupt the conversation - even just lurking feels intrusive sometimes. The discord is a fan space, and I don’t know if it’s kind for me to barge in on a whim.

(And feel free!)

[aurorafandub]

We love having you! It causes chaos and panic but what’s not to love about that

[rouge-moka]

I’m practicing on procreate lately! Fun! I also read all of @comicaurora yesterday, so here is the gang! I love them all so much send help T_T

[aurorafandub]

Looks amazing!

[anthonynotgreen]

BEHOLD

MY GREAT AND GLORIOUS VOID DRAGON THEME

@comicaurora Red pleeeeease check this out if you have a few minutes because it is the culmination of all the Aurora fan music I have made and I'm so hecking proud of it y'all have no idea, just. Look at that chromatic scale up and down the piano. The key change. The whole composition. I have surpassed myself

[hanatsuki-esperanza]

Yo, Fandub team, you’re going to use this at some point, right, please?!

[aurorafandub]

Oh, absolutely.

[eggtomatosoup]

i think i am funny

[insert glowing eyes joke here]

anyway go read @comicaurora

[aurorafandub]

*snaps picture* yep this is going in my “to dub” folder

[incorrect-comicaurora]

@comicaurora

[aurorafandub]

sometimes i miss parts of conversations in the server and then I see this and I am very pleasantly surprised thank you mbp

[incorrect-comicaurora]

@comicaurora

[aurorafandub]

sometimes i miss parts of conversations in the server and then I see this and I am very pleasantly surprised thank you mbp

[reanimatestar]

@comicaurora​ my predictions for the future

based on that one eggman and knuckles comic

bonus:

[sunlightandfreshcherries]

[comicaurora]

How long do you predict the comic to go on?

ahh, the question that haunts my dreams

so the thing is, I have seven arcs nebulously planned. We’re slooooowly coming up on the final sub-arc of the first arc, which I’m still hashing out but will probably end up being five chapters at least, which means the first arc will probably have taken me about two and a half years to finish.

That’s scary! What the fuck??

But as I make progress on the comic, I get faster at drawing the pages and can do longer batches in one go, which is good, because it means I’ve already gotten a lot faster, and I’ll probably get faster and better at making this over time. I’m also getting better at pacing the story, which means I might be able to make the arcs effective while also being shorter - or, failing that, I might be able to speed up my upload schedule if I get fast enough.

Which is good, because otherwise I’m looking at, like, fifteen years of my life. That’s terrifying! I’ve never done ANYTHING for fifteen years! I don’t wanna THINK about fifteen years from now! What the hell!

Why can’t I just think really hard, harness my chi and manifest the entire story in seven neatly-bound volumes we all can enjoy right this minute? This wish haunts my every waking moment.

So to answer your question, hopefully less than fifteen years 😬

[aurorafandub]

*sweats feverishly*

[comicaurora]

h a l l o w e e n

[comicaurora]

“this scene is happening very fast and yet somehow the update pace makes it soooo slooooow” ah the age old problem with webcomic time and archive readers vs update readers. I always suggest going back aand rereading a few pages to get back in the moment

Webcomic pacing is the hardest thing in the world. I already knew it was frustrating to READ a comic as it updates, but apparently WRITING one packs all that frustration in with the bonus frustration of being the only person who knows what’s coming next!

[aurorafandub]

and then over in this corner you have *waits 5 months for video* *waits 5 months for video* *waits 5–hey wait whats even being done on chapter thr—*

[comicaurora]

aaaa this is not technically a question, but I love how you draw fight scenes/action in both the comic and in all the legends/myths summarized videos!! It's so goodddd even tho you like to say how much you get tired of the process of choreographing fight scenes i think you really pull them off spectacularly!! do u perhaps have any tips... besides the usual looking at a bunch of refs and such- do you take inspo from action movies maybe? id love to know because like ur just so skilled red how

!!!! this is such a sweet question!

I’m so glad the choreography works! It’s difficult for me to gauge how engaging they are to read - I’m usually just focusing on making sure the movement makes sense from panel to panel. I’ve read a lot of manga where the fight scenes are beautifully drawn but frankly incomprehensible, because I have no idea how the characters are supposed to be moving in relation to each other. Because of this, when I choreograph a fight, I try and make sure the movement is clear from one panel to the next.

When drawing fight scenes for videos, I tend to exaggerate the movements a bit more than I might in a comic, since I’m usually trying to communicate the entirety of a fight scene in only one or two frames. Especially in the Journey to the West videos, I tend to give the characters very stretched poses - legs bent all the way up to the chest or stretched all the way back, arms completely extended, etc. In real life, overextending a limb is a very bad idea in a fight, but in the wonderful world of visual art, it usually looks a lot better than the more safe and realistic partially-bent option. I try to make sure the poses are all plausible, but for me, that stretch component is very important. It gives the illusion of effort - you can almost feel how the character would feel.

This frame demonstrates the stretch factor with Monkey’s entire pose, but it also demonstrates another important factor - flow. Anywhere there’s movement, I want there to be something flowing to show it. Monkey’s tail and sash and Tripitaka’s robes are very useful for this, and having a lot of characters with long hair or flowing capes also makes my job a lot easier.

Stretch makes the poses feel lively and full of movement. Flow makes it clear to the audience how the characters in this still image are supposed to be moving. Between those two factors, it becomes pretty intuitive to communicate a lot of energy in any given panel.

Of course, chaining panels together to make sure the movement is actually coherent is a different skillset altogether, and one I’m still working on. In my experience, the easiest way to make that work is coherent direction of movement.

This post is getting long, so I’m gonna try putting in a “read more”:

Using that fight scene as an example, the direction of movement shifts at the top of the page when Kendal rounds the tree. In the first panel, movement is from right to left. He pivots in panel 2, and then in panel 3, he’s abruptly attacked in a sudden burst of left-to-right movement. This is a new action; it’s fine that it’s moving in a new, opposed direction.

Kendal catches himself as he falls forward - this is still a left-to-right movement, because he’s still falling from the events of panel 3, so continuity of movement is to be expected. But the middle panel shifts focus again, because something new and unexpected is happening - his attacker is about to get kicked in the face.

In that center panel, the direction is no longer left-to-right - it’s out-to-in. We’re essentially zooming along the movement to accentuate its suddenness. Even if you can’t quite make out the detail of the boot, the movement is still pretty clear. The next panel brings us back to our familiar arrangement from panel 3, but this time, the movement has been reversed and is moving right-to-left again, as Kendal kicks back and gains the upper hand.

Finally, in the last panel of the page, the movement becomes a bit more directionless. His attacker is still moving right-to-left, continuing the flow from the impact, but the focus has shifted. The movement and overall flow is unclear, which reflects the fact that, at this point, the fight has become a stalemate.

Chaining movement together like this is tricky, as is representing clear movement in a single panel. You know it’s tricky because a lot of otherwise good media kinda sucks at it. For instance, I quite like My Hero Academia, but I’ve been keeping up with the manga for months and I have literally no idea what’s happening in these protracted superhero fights.

This next bit is going to contain spoilers from the most recent chapter, but it demonstrates my issue way too well for me to leave out:

This image has a clear direction of movement, but I have literally no idea what’s happening, except that someone might be about to get punched. (The next set of panels is not someone getting punched. It’s a flashback that lasts eight and a half pages.) The next panel that continues this action is this one:

It follows through on the clear right-to-left direction of movement established from the earlier panel, but it’s (a) still totally unclear what just actually happened, and (b) interrupted by eight and a half pages of other stuff. The panels individually look phenomenal (if a little speed-line-heavy for me) but it’s hard to know what’s actually happening. All we know is that movement happened; we can’t actually tell what happened in that movement.

In contrast, for a comic that does movement INCREDIBLY well, I recommend Usagi Yojimbo. It’s a comic about a wandering samurai who happens to be a rabbit, and all the Kurosawa-esque antics he gets into in his wanderings through ancient funny-animal Japan.

Uh oh! A setup for a fight scene! And that’s a lot of left-to-right movement I’m seeing! Even the swords in shot are all pointing that specific direction!

Oh, never mind. He’s fine. See all that right-to-left movement our hero is doing? See how the bad guys are suddenly pointing in all different directions and their movement has become chaotic and uncertain? That’s how you know the fight’s literally going our hero’s way.

This is a random encounter from a random issue of the comic. Fights happen frequently, and most of them follow the same structure - right down to the direction of movement. Bad guys move in from the left, good guy fights back from the right.

And when the fight proper starts, the background usually vanishes into a vague white void so the characters can take center stage - no visual cluttering, not even any speed lines.

These fights aren’t important. These random background mooks aren’t plot-relevant except as temporary roadblocks. As such, most of these fights play out roughly the same - no background, page-wide panels, minimal dialogue. But the serious fights? Those look pretty different.

Environmental shots! Close-ups! Banter! Backgrounds! The direction of movement is even reversed from the norm! This immediately sets the fight apart from the standard. Characters move around each other, the environment come into play, and each panel is a very clear beat in the progress of the fight.

Usagi Yojimbo is probably my favorite comic ever. But it’s also not the only very useful resource when you’re looking for media that does well-choreographed fights. Comics are good (even if a lot of them are just good bad examples), but animated media is built on a lot of the same principles as comic art. While they have an easier time showing movement (since they involve actual movement, rather than static images) they still need to chain shots together in a way that’s coherent and gives the audience enough information to understand the movement and progression of the situation. Movies and tv won’t help you much with drawing individual static images that communicate dynamic poses, but they can help a lot if you’re figuring out how one phrase of the fight should chain into the next.

While I’ve seen plenty of media that does this well, rather than making you analyze this stuff from the ground up, allow me to recommend a youtube channel that can do the analysis for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mACKHGfdLlo&ab_channel=JillBearup

Jill Bearup has a wonderful channel with a criminally small subscriber base. I only found her within the last month and I think she’s amazing. Everyone should watch her videos about fight choreography.

This answer got much longer than I expected, but I hope it was helpful!