44 - WAR III

WAR III

Bit of a complicated background behind this page. Here's some insight into OC tournaments, too.

When you lose in an OC tournament, there's usually two responses:

You shrug, chalk it up to better luck next time, and look for another OC tournament to join if you're still up for a bit of competition.
You decide to carry on the story you've started by working with other tournaments losers and those still competing, creating "spectator entries".

Obviously, the majority of the Docs' story is told in spectator entries. At this point in the whole process it was actually really difficult to produce the pages from an incentive standpoint. I look back on the previous two pages ("WAR" part 1 and 2) with some disdain, as they required me to force myself to make them. I was suffering from what I call "spectator fatigue".

Originally, this page was going to be produced by Red-Rook, who'd even handed me the script he'd planned to use. However, deadlines came and went and this page went undrawn. I had to fill in Degulus on what happened in the page so he could continue his story. Red-Rook disappeared for a while, having succumbed to the spectator fatigue and losing interest, which is fair enough: once you're out of the tournament, you're no longer part of it really. I too felt urges to drop the Docs' storyline and continue with other projects.

The thing that kept me going was the fact that I'd come this far, and Steel Nation was something I intended to be a canon starting point for Gyrode and Smiffington. I'm glad I stuck with the story until the end!

I had tried to get my other half (Psi) to draw this page in its entirety (using R-R's script but with some tweaks of mine), but dropped the pressure from her shoulders as it was unfair to expect someone to draw something they've not really had any hand in.

Her pages sat around on my hard drive for a couple of years, until I got around to clearing up my files and decided it was probably time to fill in the blanks, hence the script-style presentation after several panels. Steel Nation started in 2008, but it took until 2011 to get this page finished.

Credits: