ANTOINE

AND THE ALL NEOPIAN REJECTS

Antoine and the All Neopian Rejects

The Reject’s Guide to the Galaxy

Ask Ze Nuvakat

Author’s commentary

Song lyrics

Staff credits

Comic #0: Remembering “Reject”

One lovely Thursday night around late July 2007, I threw a hissy fit at the library because the computers weren’t available. I also threw my purse at a display of books. The purse knocked a book off the shelf, and my dad knocked a week off my computer time. (I am now on medication, and let the record state that I am very sorry that I reacted that way. Really.)

At the time, this was devastating. I was working on what I thought would be my big story on FanFiction.net, and I couldn’t afford any loss of computer time. I was crushed. So, since life had handed me a lemon (which I had pretty much asked for), I made lemonade. If I couldn’t work on the story on the computer, I would simply work on the story OFF the computer. I couldn’t just write the story on paper and type it in, because I’d already written it out, so I decided to try my hand at doing a comic book.

And it outlived the epic.

Cover

I actually did the cover right after Page Three of comic #1. There’s not much to say about it, just that it was my one time actually trying to shade something (Lewanut) and that I tried to do dramatic lighting but did a really cheesy job. Oh, and the Dodger was added because I had a big empty space where the lower line of text outdistanced the big “ANTOINE”. I’d originally thought that it would be a cute addition, but I now think that the Dodger loses something when he’s that big and in your face, and besides, Dodge only appeared in one panel in “Reject”, so it wasn’t easy for the readers to identify him with the comic. Now, of course, I don’t produce covers at all, because they’re unnecessary, they take time away from working on the comic, and I flunked two out of three of them. (#2’s is the one I’m actually impressed with, but that’s another story.)

Page 1

This page was drawn and inked within twelve hours, which really surprised me. My first approach was simply to illustrate the story I was writing, so I touched up on events that I elaborated more on in the text edition. I really think the second panel is very well done for such a chaotic scene and for a relative amateur. The narration in Antoine’s thick accent was a bit of a nod to old comic strips such as Krazy Kat and Lil’ Abner, which often had characters speaking in accents that were often a little hard to understand. One reader commented how he enjoyed being able to hear the French accent in his head without tripping over strange spellings. I purposely neglected to corrupt the “i” sound in Robotnik into an “ee” because I thought that it would make the comic a bit easier to read. If you’ll notice, Antoine uses “preceded” for “proceeded” and “unfoundable” for “unfounded”. This demonstrates one of the most prominent quirks of his character, his constant confusion of the English language, although not as much so as in the SatAM show this comic was based on (In Sub Sonic, he asked Sonic if he thought they had been born tomorrow, and later he says that he had had his whole life behind him).

Page 2

My favorite panel on this page is the first one -- it gets the message across without even showing the characters’ eyes, which I think is effective. Antoine’s “Mon Dieu” has a “please” after it to make it clear that he’s talking to God, not taking His name in vain as he did in the Archie comics. The SWATbot has a red light on his head because I used the Sonic Archives as a reference for drawing, which was a bit of a mistake on my part. Other than that, there’s not much to say on this one.

Page 3

The Electric Mayhem has an interesting history -- originally, due to some confusion in the Neopian Times editorial regarding the use of certain swear words, my brother decided to stop playing Neopets, and he had his Neopets build a spaceship to take them to other planets. I had had the idea for AANR for quite some time before this, but my original thought had been to have them travel by warp ring -- but I grasped the idea of a spaceship pretty quickly. Lewanut (my brother) originally called the spaceship Spaced Out, but I thought this name sounded silly, so I asked him what each of his Neopets and Petpets would name the spaceship if they were given the opportunity. There were some interesting entries -- Chan wanted to call it No Kougras Allowed and Neotiger came up with Give Neotiger Fish, but the final choice that his Neopets voted for was Benson the Deaver’s Electric Mayhem. (The ship is psychedelic because Lutayra, Samantha, Ingo, Benson, and Tyson snuck out in the middle of the night and painted it. I used some special metallic pencils to color it and various other parts of the comic, such as the robodragons.)

The “two hours forty-seven minutes” was a reference to the original epic, which had a much more complicated explanation of how they came to that figure. I had actually made all those mistakes in my original calculations for their landing time. If you’ll notice, it’s Dodger that gives the “half hour” figure in the epic instead of Moonshine -- I simplified the storyline because I didn’t have room for all that talk, and it would have been boring. (Moonshine, incidentally, was drawn without any reference to a Tyrranian Kau, because I was not allowed online at that time. My punishment was extended another week for throwing another hissy fit at church, but this is humiliating enough without telling you the details.)

Oh, and Dodger isn’t “talking” in panel four -- he’s typing into his computer, which synthesizes a voice for him. Dodger doesn’t talk -- he hiccups.

Page 4

I really like panel two. Actually, I really like working with silhouettes in general, because they can be so effective without too much detail. The sunset is also really cool.

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