Ok. If you do use your classic ballpoint style. Maybe you can use it for sorta flashback or past kinda scenes. You know. Mix the 2 styles together in a way. The more sketch like style makes me think of madoka magica mainly for how raw it looked. But I actually like the style.
Also.. if you wanna spoil or leak anything for your abandoned cuphead AU. Feel free bc if its not going to get updated. Now's the time to spill the jug content.
I'm going to be honest; this ask made me reread the entire thing, and 21-year-old me was onto something.
It was actually really cool how I incorporated the asks from the readers into the narrative back then. How they could give advice and send things to Jug, but most importantly give moral support to the protagonist and distract him from the awful situation.
Rereading it, I also found a lot of foreshadowing that sadly didn’t go anywhere because i never continued the comic. Like how the devil’s minions were following them and stuff.
Reading it again, I now remember how much research went into making it, i was making backgrounds based on the canon battle sets with the same color palettes, and I learned the names of characters, levels, locations, attacks, and game mechanics to make them a part of the comic organically.
I was really excited back then to show how every attack affected Jug when he activated it and how he learned to use each one of them.
All panels were different sizes, and i had a lot to learn about composition, but i didn’t remember it looking this clean. It wasn’t perfect, but i had more of a grasp on posing and camera angles than i gave 21 y/o me credit for. It almost makes me want to continue the comic if it weren't for the fact i have other projects that, if i had time to make them, would take priority over this one.
Also, I've been out of that fandom for way too long to remember all the mechanics and terms from the game, and i would need to redo all that research
I have also lost the pen configuration I used for the lineart and backgrounds since i started using Sai2 and would have to find a way to replicate it.
Honestly, I'm not sure if I want to disclose what was going to happen in the story originally because I could either reuse it for other projects or actually revive the project in a different format in a distant future. (It's unlikely but not impossible.)
While rereading it, I realized I used A LOT of the themes i didn't get to use in Toon Journey in CSAU, so continuing this story could have the downside of making it look as if i can’t come up with anything that isn’t CSAU-adjacent.
Without giving much context, things like the colored text to tell characters apart (i got that from homestck originaly), the readers inlfuencing the narrative (tho it was way more subtle on CSAU), the found family thing, the whole identity crisis thing from being something fused and different, the sibling dinamic, the child with powers sent to fight with no idea of what he’s doing, the crazy world constantly changing around you, etc, etc, there's more but i won't put it here.
But I basically poured it all on CSAU instead, where it honestly made a little more sense
Since you're interested in it, i dug out the sketches from the comic that should've been posted following the last chapter on the official blog. It's from 8 years ago (jesus...) It's incomplete, and the grammar is awful, but you can have it.
Nah, just kidding, but basically this comic opened the door to two important plots in the comic.
1: Cups and Mugs were basically merging slowly, and it would be a race against time to undo the fusion thing before it's irreversible; this is proven by them speaking in a new purple voice, their eyes would be purple every now and then, and always for longer periods of time.
2: The kids feel a sense of déjà vu, like they've been here before and fought this fight already, and it may not only be in their heads, seeing how the tutorial pedestal was already broken and they already knew its contents. The biggest hint to all of this happening before is the nightmare they had about giving the contracts to the devil and becoming corrupted.
Funny enough, this is the last level I played on the original game before giving up because it was insanely difficult for me T-T but Hilda was one of my favorite characters, and I shipped her with Cagney so much </3
It gives me a lot of nostalgia to reread this comic because i loved it very much, and it hurt a lot to discontinue it.
I made this comic in a 6 month period when my sister was on her last semester in uni. when she finished, me, my bff and her went back to class together and started working on our joint thesis, which took 3 years, coinciding with the pandemic.
While making the thesis, I made CSAU because it was actually way easier. No color, no backgrounds, no handwritten text, no game mechanics to incorporate, and the original already had an ending, so it was just an AU, while every chapter of Toon Journey took weeks to finish, CSAU was like 10 times faster, and i could actually make it alongside my thesis, unlike TJ.
It was a matter of the circumstances I was in back then, and it still is. I'm still fighting to have the time to work on the things i love like i did back when i was studying living with family, and i really appreciate messages like yours that consider even my old work to be worth reading
Here's some concept art from way back then. Most things don't have an actual context at all and it's brainstorming scenarios
romaincrisis
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
areudirty
