Oculama

With the conclusion of our latest tournament, The Contract, our final death tournament of 2025, we speak with the winner, Magistelle! Magistelle is a very skilled artist, having done the OCT circuit for a long time. Showcasing their unique talents and attention to detail, they provided an incredible set of comics for everyone to read. With that in mind, it only seemed natural to interview them and to get a glimpse of what happened behind the scenes of their incredible performance that crowned them as the champion!

Hey howdy hey! I’ve been doing comics ever since I had an account back on Deviantart at 12 years old. I was enraptured by manga as a child (One Piece was the thing I had been exposed to that had convinced me to start drawing with the goal of improvement!) and I had actually had the coincidental fortune of stumbling onto somebody’s reference sheet for an OCT. Curiosity led me to looking more into it, and the wide world of OCTs opened itself up to me. I was enamored with the idea that you could draw comics competitively and wanted so very much to be part of it all, and eventually found my way to a site called EnterVOID. I felt like there, due to the environment at the time, that my growth as an artist became exponential, which only grew twicefold once I attended SCAD and achieved a degree in comics. From there, it was a sort of pinball-esque progression of burnout with the previous site, a reignition with Tom’s Ring of Power tournament, and the rest is history.

I always wanted to emphasize two things throughout the stories; how the assassination work Bela does affects him and his perspective on the world and others, and how the relationship he has with his family further influences that. I went into each idea I might’ve had with an opponent with those two ideals in mind to keep a degree of narrative consistency. These two things are the core of who he is, and it was important to me that every round featured it.

In the end, though, I owe a lot of it to tossing ideas back and forth to close friends of mine, shooting general ideas their way to get feedback on how I could further fine-tune and tighten up narrative beats. I get in my own head a lot when it comes to writing, and having an outside perspective helps me to break out of that and makes me consider elements and angles I might not have because I was too focused on getting a certain plot beat to work.

Oh man, where to begin-

I think, first and foremost, is the importance of setting a schedule for yourself and sticking to it! Having a rudimentary understanding of how long it takes you to brainstorm, to thumbnail, etc etc., goes a long way, and holding yourself to a quota to fulfill per day makes things add up in a major way while also giving you peace of mind. It’s always easier said than done, but it always helps a lot! And with making a schedule segues into the next point:

Allocate enough time to give yourself tiny breaks! Attend functions, play an hour or 2 of a video game, draw something that isn’t your comic; running on all cylinders all the time might be possible for you, but you can run yourself ragged with burnout or biting off more than you can chew, and it can ultimately be detrimental to your health. Just because you can do an obscene amount of work in a certain amount of time doesn’t ever mean you should! Figuring out what you can do at 80-85% capacity, I feel, is always more important since that’s where your usual consistency will hover at. Allocating break time can also help twofold in case something comes up unexpectedly that bites into your drawing time, because then you’re not stressing yourself out to try and make up the work since you already allocated time!

These previous two points all hang onto the most important quality to have: discipline. Comic-making is, at the end of the day, a lot of thankless work still, and discipline is invaluable to putting everything together. And if it’s hard to find that discipline in yourself, store-bought is fine (an accountability-buddy!)

It took several years of just prioritizing speed in order to streamline my process down to what I would describe as a Ford assembly line. I would say that a lot of it is due in part to the very crushing workload I had to handle while I was in college; the curriculum was very sink-or-swim with very demanding deadlines in order to ensure that its students can handle the very rapid pace of actual industry work. It’s not for everyone, and it was extremely stressful, but it did forge me into the speedster I am today.

I have an extremely particular way of making comics as a result, from having a standardized file that has a page template with layers and folders already set in place, finishing up my pages up to a certain point in the drawing process before moving on (thumbs to sketches to inks, etc), and having countless textures, models, and brushes I’ve collected like a squirrel in the winter. It’s such a particular process that if any part of it were to be interrupted or done differently, I can guarantee it would halve my speed from the disruption of rhythm alone. It’s always a bumpy experience introducing new elements to the process, and sometimes I stumble and slow down while doing so, but the room I give myself to experiment is always worthwhile!

Another important thing is letting go of the idea that something is going to end up perfect, and accepting things as “serviceable” while moving on. Chances are, a fresh pair of eyes is all you need to rework something rather than finagling with it in the moment, and there’s always time to make edits or rework something later on. And even if there isn’t, it’s a valuable skill to accept that and continue onward.

The third and final round definitely went through a couple of rapidfire initial ideas before I settled into what it became. The strongest contender that almost became reality was of Ronan and Toni going head to head with the Booger Brothers and Laurie respectively and much more directly with Bela much more indisposed from the events in Round 2. The apartment was also going to be torn to shreds and blown up a lot more from heavier exchanges of gunfire and explosions, practically gutting that whole side of the building.

While I think it would have been a real showstopper, I quickly realized that the level of environmental destruction and scene-juggling I would’ve had to do would have been way too much for me to reasonably handle in the three weeks we had been given. I dialed back the scope in order to not go insane, especially since I could tell going in that with the drastic differences in tone that my opponents were going for that trying to marry them together would have been a difficult enough undertaking by itself.

There was also this page in Round 2 with two big parts that I redrew as the middle panel was too reminiscent of the sequence on the next page after, and the final panel was too awkwardly posed.

I use Clip Studio Paint EX! As for scripting, I don’t tend to script out any of my comics unless there’s a lot of moving parts I need to sit down and think through. Rounds 1 and 2, I went directly into thumbnails without so much as writing a single word aside from spitballing the initial ideas to my friends in a “is this gas or whack” sort of way. I tend to get too caught in the weeds if I go for proper script formats, so I find it easier to dive right into drawing.

Round 3 was an exception because there were a lot of moving parts that I needed to think about and handle, so I couldn’t go directly into thumbnails or else I would just be utterly stumped and end up wasting time while trying to figure out what happens next. Even then, my scripts are very hodge-podge and frenetic by design to prevent myself from getting caught up in the little details, and I have no set format for them as they’re not a standardized part of my comic-making process.

This was a process that a wonderful friend showed me in order to make background work a lot quicker, and I hope that by utilizing it, it helps you too. It’s certainly helped me to visualize backgrounds a lot easier and has been a massive encouragement to include them more often in my comics whereas beforehand, it felt like teethpulling.

Firstly, you want to get your background image! Any kind works, but the bigger it is, the better in order to keep from looking pixelated if you need to upscale it.

Second is lowering the opacity to draw your characters in. Before I started doing this, I had a very tough time visualizing the size of characters in the environments they took up, but over time of doing this process, it’s helped me to independently figure this out.

Next, make a copy of the image and go to Edit>Tonal Correction>Binarization and fiddle with the ratio of black to white. Sometimes, the balance in certain areas is better than in others, in which case you can make 2 edits and fuse them together. The buildings are too dark in the first image while the road is too light in the second, so I simply make two versions and then meld them together.

Lastly, you want to go in and paint over it to bring out details that got lost in the process, as well as helping it mesh with your art style.

And there you have it! A scene of Bela taking a leisurely stroll. From here, I can use this image as further reference for any scenes that take place in the scene now that it’s been established.

I can be easily found on Bluesky under the same handle! Twitter and Tumblr as well, though Bluesky is my usual stomping ground.

• https://bsky.app/profile/magistelle.bsky.social
• https://www.tumblr.com/magistelle
• https://x.com/Magistelle