MAP: Stage 1
Progress report
Despite all the maps, character drawings, and concept art I make before starting most of my comics, I tend to work more by referring back to old panels or pages than any of my reference material. For the Ascenkor map, as I reached more recent cells, I found myself forced to rely on only a few pages where the cells in question appear.
By this iteration, I had gotten to
Old cells drift to the “edge” of the Eldernet1 as they age; most are relics of forms of content that have no place in a perfectly insular online city, such as “unboxing” (no delivery boxes left) or political commentary, since there is no concept of politics2.
The laboratory is used not only as a testing arena for The Distortions, but also as a containment area for specimens and an analog decryption facility.
Ascenkor reuses a lot of products from around the Eldernet; the table in the armory is a repurposed floaty-tile-puzzle-thing from the PHPlay cell.
More recently, I got to the hygienic cell that opens chapter four and Ascenkor’s private cell3.
The next installment will conclude the linework, include a bit more backstory on the development of the whole Ascenkor environment, and move on to the color/marker process.
Per usual, thanks for reading.
The Eldernet is infinitely large. It has a navigable edge, but that edge is inaccessible to anyone inside. It’s not a hypercube, but the idea’s similar—it’s possible to triangulate the closest edge, but not possible to reach it.
The cell for nationalist aesthetics and debate games shows up here, in panel four, but it’s not really the same thing.
Which does not appear until the end of the chapter.