[Art] Homecoming + 'What do you mean...?' + Gorecki

[kasche]

...

Wait. We WON? O_O

Er. What does it say about me as a team-member that I wasn't expecting that at all? :P But CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE PLAYERS! We all worked pretty hard, whichever the team, and we all deserve it! :D

(And my face does not resemble Lisa's icon. Nope, not at all. *g* As they, you're all young once, but can stay immature forever... ;D)

(Which reminds me that I REALLY need to see that movie. Ni showed me some YT clips a while ago and I was so laughing my head off.)

Because really - yup, that was two brackets ago - this fest was so much work. Seriously. I am considering just sticking to regular exchanges after this. ;P Not that it wasn't fun, because it actually was, but... let's just say that I've drawn more in the months since I started working on these than I have in the past couple years. ;)

...of course, in the past couple years drawing had gone a little on the downside, but that's not the point. Er.

Also, weirdly enough, this time I've got something of a commentary at the bottom. It's just this once, though - I don't really see this becoming an habit of any kind. And it's really almost all about Gorecki. I don't know, it's my first time doing something like that, and-- I'll continue below. ;P

Homecoming Rating: PG Warnings: Boykiss! Summary: Remus comes home after a long day at work. Genre: Fluff/Romance

What do you mean, not me? Rating: PG-13 Warnings: NWS. Naked butt! Summary: Because even reading the newspaper can give ideas. Genre: Humor/Crack

Gorecki Rating: G Summary: November 1981. Genre: Angst

(Last I checked, there was some problem with the rs_games website - so, in case the original pages are still down, it might be worth mentioning that I have a backup art archive on kasche. There might not be much more, but these ARE on there. :P)

Gorecki - which wouldn't get its title until the very last moment - is really the first idea I decided on, and the one I would have done if we'd been asked to do just the one submission. Homecoming came to me only in a second time, as I was rereading the prompts list - and in many ways it's like most of the stuff I've done up to now, is it not? Lighthearted, linear, somewhere between silly and sweet. Kind of. (Same goes with Why not me - though that one's really just silly. Then again, it was a last minute pinch-hit, so I guess it's natural that I instinctively fell back on a trusted ground.) So, I suppose I could say that I played it safe on one side and went out on a limb on the other? I don't really know. It might be.

Gorecki was more of a wild card. The inspiration for it came to me sometime around last Nov/Dec, as I was reading sekhmet2's story for The Ni Project. In it, Remus (at some point during the 12 "missing years") thinks/says it only brings back memories of a man that doesn’t exist anymore (referring to Sirius) - and my mind went off thinking how, after Halloween 1981, he really must felt that he hadn't known Sirius at all. That the person he first had been friends with, then fallen for, was not the one that had actually been in front of his eyes all that time - and if he'd see him again, before the other got shipped off to Azkaban, Sirius must have looked (and felt) like a complete stranger to his eyes. Hence the "who are you".

As for the actual setting of the strip, I can tell you what I had in mind - though it's nothing binding. I mean, as we all well know, if it isn't stated expressly in the work itself? We're really kind of free to imagine whatever fits. ;D At any rate: whether or not Sirius had an actual process, it's not unlikely that they had him face the wizarding population. (It's one thing to just tell people that the culprit has been caught, and quite another to show the actual face and see "here, it's all his fault", isn't it?) Gorecki takes place right before that: while Sirius, still in the previous day's clothes, is being carted off to either the process' room or the gallows*, his path comes close to the same crowd that's going to face him (which is why we have human guards instead of dementors) and Remus is part of it. (I dunno, I liked the idea of an uncaring crowd flowing around their own personal "tragedy". :P) As I was deciding what I should have Remus wear, I realized that he might be coming straight from James and Lily's funeral - which would be kind of an early time for it, seeing as usually the funeral takes place the day after (where I live, at least), but I guessed that people might want to rush things, in order to leave it all behind as soon as possible. And, all right, I just wanted an excuse to have Remus in a black suit.

What actually surprised me was how ridiculously nervous I was, when I realized they would be posting it any day. O_o I just really, really wanted it to work, you know? And... probably it was also the fact that, as I was drawing it, at some point I ended up putting in it some of the anger and frustration I was feeling at the time (over other matters *g*) and while that didn't really influence the storyboard or anything, it made the strip feel more like a child of sorts than the other stuff I've done. ;D And, all right, it guess it was also that I was afraid it would make people yawn. :P I'm really not experienced in that genre.

But I got beautiful, beautiful comments, on all three of them, and... oh, that made me really so glad. It was so much more than I would have expected. ♥ Thank you!



* Not actual gallows, since he's never sentenced, but just... shown. To people who are not head over heels for him at this moment in time.

Comments

[mustntgetmy.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks for all the commentary on Gorecki cause I thought it was a showing of Sirius to the public before Azkaban but I was all 'where the dementors at?' So all your commentary was helpful to my feeble mind :D Every picture here is so well done, but there's something about Gorecki that's especially striking. Especially that one panel of just Sirius's eyes after Remus responds.

[kasche.livejournal.com]

Yep! There's a lot of backstory going on, isn't there? As I worked the details in, I kept working to try and make them all coexist in a plausible way... which is probably why I wanted to talk about it so badly. *g* Glad you found it of use! That you noticed the absence of the dementors, too :D And that you liked it, of course. ;)

♥♥♥!

[mustntgetmy.livejournal.com]

I really like that there's a lot of backstory because it gives me an excuse to look at it for a longer amount of time ^_^

[kasche.livejournal.com]

Eeeee! Oh, sweets. XD

[mustntgetmy.livejournal.com]

I'm friending you if that's all right. I'd like to keep up with your art :D

[kasche.livejournal.com]

Aw! Of course it's all right, I'm flattered you want to! :D