Oculama

With the year nearly completed we go in for our final winner's interview of 2024, Ninja, the Champion of Battle Babes 2024! Having ourselves a little sit down, we talk about the goals set and accomplished by our victor as we talk what was required to take Accountagopher from fresh character to the conclusion of another exciting tournament.

Tell us about yourself! How long have you been doing comics? How'd your comic history lead you to Oculama?

I have been doing comics for just over three years now. I got my actual comic start auditioning for Round 6 of War for Rayuba and got into round 7 (Despite only ever making 2 comics up to that point). From there I became a pretty vocal part of the Goku Royale community, eventually getting to the point where I have successfully run my own Goku Royale Original Character comic Tournaments. I was brought over to Oculama along with the rest of the Project Root Beer people back when Oculama was first starting up. Then the admin team invited me to be a Discord server mod and I’ve been trapped in the basement ever since.

You took a unique approach with how Accountagopher handled the Battle Babe’s Tourney by contending with the theater of the mind as opposed to the usual fisticuffs. What was your motivation behind it? 

Accountagopher was created as a break from the norm or what I normally did. There was a conversation about how few “Sillies” there are in OCTs and Accountagopher was born from that. I wasn’t going to enter her at all until I fell in love with her. Accountagophers theatre of the mind came from her greatest weakness (And subsequently her greatest strength), of just being a regular gopher. A silly was never going to beat anyone up and a gopher certainly wasn’t going to do that either so I needed a way for Accountagopher to be involved in scenes with these characters who were so much above her. Secondly and probably most importantly it was a way for me to do realistically anything, if the entire tournament was in her head I could bend things around and set up situations that only made sense because it was in her mind. A lot of this didn’t fully make it into the tournament but you can see it in the battle with Sketch’s Sigmund and Detective Accountagopher. It was really just a way for me to have fun and do stupid things.

What advice can you provide any artists aspiring to get into a comic tournament?

Time Management. That’s the key behind my entire process. After being in the community for a few years I’ve noticed it a fair amount of times. People set goals for themselves, be it 2 pages a day, hit it and stop. When I set these goals for myself my aim is to go beyond said limit, so if I wanted to be on a 2 page a day schedule my goal is 4-5 pages. When I go over my goal for a day I keep up that same drive, even though I’m 2-3 pages ahead of where I planned to be I still keep myself to that goal of however many pages a day. 
Secondly, and this might be as important as time management, I just draw. This is lowkey controversial cause I’ve told it to people before and they haven’t been too big of fans of it but I just jump into it and draw. On days where I don’t feel like drawing, I draw until I feel like drawing, and because I feel like drawing I draw more and more. People have called it toxic before but like I want to constantly better myself and my comics and this set of rules allows me the ability to constantly be improving and keeps my comics on the same level. In terms of colour, my process was all over the place.
The majority of the comics all got coloured how I would normally colour a comic and after that I would colour match trying to emulate a certain feeling or atmosphere that I wanted. Round 2 was the only comic that I practically knew it all from the start, and just coloured stylized from the get go. There’s a version of that first comic with a more normal set to it, and there's a version of the Finale which brings out a really heavy purple and did a lot of really weird things, but ultimately those all had to change to go with what I believed (and seems like they were from the results) to be stronger choices. In the end it was a lot of playing around with Colour Match, which is my CSP saving grace and the one good thing about CSP 3.0. Apart from that it was just a lot of playing around with colours and reading other comics with the feel that I wanted, (fun fact the artist portion of the Finale uses the same colours as Animal Man talking to Grant Morrison.).
My gameplan from the start was to just have fun (as cliche as it sounds). I had no idea what Accountagophers story was going to be. In fact my original idea for how the tournament was going to go was to have Accountagopher change genre within each daydream. Never truly got to the level I wanted to in the tournament itself but it is what it is, most gameplans never actually work out and you gotta take that in stride. Although I did have one more gameplan, this wasn’t from the start but right after Round 1 I realized the next couple comics and other OCTs I was in meant that the Finale was going to be my 100th comic. When I realized that I was all in. Losing wasn’t an option anymore, I had to perform to the best I could possibly be and elevate my own skills to face off against everyone else.

Who were you most excited to battle in this tourney? Who was the most challenging?

I wanted Holly from the get go. She was the most like Accountagopher and by God I knew that match was going to be a joy to write. Also I never got to fight them but I really wanted to fight Devil’s Tooth, because boy howdy is that a hot character. Truly a Babe who battles. My most challenging battle was going to be Holly and JaJa. What made this battle so challenging was how different everybody was. I can easily write Accoutnagopher against both of them on their own, but once you add the third combatant to the mix the story needs to change to fit all 3 characters, which is hard when Accountagopher really excels in those 1 on 1 interactions.

Were there any story ideas, or concepts that hit the cutting room floor? 

So MUCH got cut. The nature of Accountagopher and her stories meant I had a billion different ideas that never saw the light of day. Some of those made their way into comics in smaller roles, some are going to get repurposed for other comics with her. Some of the larger ones were in the finale. Very early on I had an idea to turn Ishar’s baby into more of an Aliens level threat, full xenomorph horror and everything. The comic would be about Ishar, Accountagopher and Lu all holding off against this endless swarm of baby goop, but it mainly got cut because it didn’t have the feeling I really wanted for it. Going off of that as well. I really fell in love with the idea of the actress who plays Accountagopher, and there were plenty of ideas to have the main comic actually be on the movie set with the actors behind all the characters fighting with Accountagopher for whatever reason which all built towards the artist character talk. It almost entirely got cut because of how volatile I thought the scene was. I knew there would be people who really enjoyed it and appreciated it because I believe it is such an important part of her character but I also knew there are people who would despise that part. I spent a long time without any dialogue on those pages because I wanted to get it right. It only stayed in the comic because of the “What’s so wrong about being a gopher” which in my mind brought it all together, and really brought her character and her story together. I really loved that and I’m glad that it was able to stay in the comic. 10/10 line and I hope that it hit the rest of y’all as much as it hit me.

Aside from Oculama, where can you be found?

Twitter/ X

Bluesky

 
Check me out over on the Goku Royal 3.33 server if anyone wants to get in contact with me more directly