Bust out some 3D glasses for the full effect.

These are sample pages from a “directed projects in sequential art“ class. I decided I wanted to do an old-school anaglyphic comic. This led me down a rabbit hole of different effects and techniques: magic eyes, invisible ink/ blacklight images, real cryptographical stuff. Ultimately most of them were unsuitable for this project, but they’re still on my list of things to do.

If you’re wondering why that one guy only exists in blue and not red, it’s because he’s a ghost. Obviously. Since your eyeballs are constantly vibrating to establish depth, and since he’s only visible with one eye, he seems to move. Isn’t science fun? It’s an interesting otherworldly effect.

What is this story about? There’s a ghost and some kind of extra-dimensional monster, so who’s this jet pilot guy? He’s Kilroy, government agent/ action guy. He’s an agent of I.N.C.O.G.N.I.T.O., an acronym that I never worked out completely. He starts the story on a mission to track something that fell to Earth that his bosses think is the recently launched Russian satellite Spudnik.

This comic was partially inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The ghost guy, Sahir, was inspired by Abdul Alhazred. The script has Kilroy wandering under the full moon to The City Beyond the Dunes, which can only be found by dying men. Again, based on Lovecraft’s Nameless City. Kilroy drinks from the Well of Second Sight and then he can see Sahir, but the rescue party thinks he’s delirious from dehydration.

Also, I didn’t write dialog in the script except for a sample for this page:

panel 2: “This looks more like a potato than Spudnik. I’d better make sure this potato’s not hot!”

panel 3: “That’s odd, the Geiger counter is reading lower than even background radiation. Stanger still, it’s cold to the touch!”

panel 4: “Hoo, if only it could cool the rest of me. If I don’t find some shade, I’ll be done for.”

panel 5: “I feel as if some invisible force is compelling me over that dune…“

All the City Beyond the Dunes stuff was beyond the scope of the project, so there’s a 7 page jump here. Kilroy is recovering in the infirmary and the kooky scientist (every comic from the ‘60s had one) Dr. Dinnerstein is now analyzing the meteor/ space fossil. His assistant is his more practical daughter/ Kilroy’s love interest Kitty (every comic from the ‘60s had one of these too). Remember how the meteor had less than background radiation and was cold to the touch? That’s because it is absorbing radiation to wake from its space voyage… and now the Dinnersteins are X-raying it. As the monster comes to life it the only thing to project forward past the plane of the page; All the 3D stuff had been receding until this point.

“Aw hell, Kitty’s in danger again.”

let’s talk about the monster here for a minute. I devoted a lot of time to making sure it felt both alien and like a guy in a rubber suit. I referred to the monster in the script as “Po’tate” because of the Spudnik connection. I know the satellite was spu-t-nik, but I was sticking with the homage to the ‘60s and their propensity to make little changes like that. Also, it looks like a potato when it’s dormant. Po’tate is actually an explorer for his species, and it is even dressed for interstellar travel. The hard crustacean looking parts are actually a separate creature of which the Po’tate species are parasites. The weird mushroom coming out the mouth is the sensory organ of the parasite, and the frilly bits below are a filter feeding system.

I told you I spent a lot of time designing the thing.

Early on in the process of making this comic, I had plans for Sahir to only be visible under a black light. I was so deep in the steganography thing at that point that I wasn’t even going to mention this feature directly. I had plans for a panel on a left hand page where Kilroy would be shouting “don’t you see it? It’s right there!” and pointing to an empty space. Just beyond that, on the facing page, would be old comic ads and a slightly stylistically different black light ad. Maybe a year after publishing, if nobody had discovered this, I would have let it slip. Maybe.

It was an intensive process figuring out how to make the black light function even work: the short answer is printing in a light yellow that can’t be seen under normal lighting conditions but will show up under black (really more purple) light. Factoring in differences in paper brightness, florescent lighting compared to sunlight, and printer capabilities proved to be a formidable challenge. There was also the issue of blocking. If Sahir was going to work as an invisible “bonus feature,” then every panel would have to work both with and without him. This page does a passable job on that front.

Ultimately, the black light idea had to go. It really came down to printing capabilities of all things. Let’s back up a bit. 3D glasses work because of retinal disparity. Your eyes get two slightly different images and use that information to determine depth. Hold one of your fingers a few inches from your nose and close one eye, then the other. It’s like that. So if one could control what information each eye was getting, those depth cues could be faked. So, just put a colored filter over each eye and you’re set. It’s easy- in theory. If the colors aren’t filtered out cleanly, you get “ghosting” which ruins the illusion. Getting the right colors so they filter out is easy if you’re working with RGB (the spectrum of light screens use) but incredibly tedious when working in CMYK (the spectrum of colors you can get with a standard printer). The colors that would filter out were so light that they didn’t turn to black in the other eye. To eliminate ghosting completely required a grayish background… which then wouldn’t work with the yellow ink. I’m not going to say it can’t be done, just that it couldn’t be done with the time constraints I had.

“Why is Sahir RED instead of blue?” He is blue. It’s the black space behind him that is red. When you close your red eye, you can’t see him, just like in all the other pages. Have you been paying attention at all?