Oculama

Following the thrilling wrap-up of our very first White Diamond Tournament, we're sitting down with the champion, Sparkle Magic Didi™! We are here to catch up with them for an exclusive chat, diving into the creative process, inspirations, and behind-the-scenes magic that led to their triumphant resurrection of Tembel as the ultimate victor!

Hiiiiieeeeeeee, I’m Bridget, I’m 36, I’m from the US, New York (not the city) specifically! I’ve been making comics since I was around 9! I liked not paying attention in class and making silly lil stories and sharing them with my friends. I loved reading comics growing up, Calvin and Hobbes was a massive inspiration, I loved X-Men, and I was in middle school when manga and anime really HIT in the early 2000s, so I gobbled lots of that up as well, starting with things like Ranma ½, Dragonball, and Sailor Moon. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I draw inspiration from all kinds of places like I assume everyone does, video games, cartoons, prose, life! All of it feeds comics. I kept making comics on and off for funsies, always doing art very nonseriously or in any kind of organized fashion (Yay undiagnosed ADHD!).

I joined my first comic battle site, War For Arcadia, in 2008. They were my first taste of making comics with other people, telling a story collaboratively. The way WFA worked was that there was an overarching story of a war between two factions, and it was broken up into rounds. Each round lasted a month, and each round, you would be paired off against someone from the other faction in a location on a map they had drawn out. I think the War For Rayuba tourney used a similar system, Abaddon was one of the contributors to WFA back in the day! The thing I really liked about WFA is that instead of having a whole month draw time, though, it would be broken up into weeks. One week, one artist would start the story, the next week, the other artist would pick it up and continue the story in their pages, and so on. It was a really cool way to do comic battles, you were literally working with your opponent to tell a good story!

There was some overlap between WFA and EnterVoid, but I didn’t dip my toes there until much later, they were more hardcore about critiques and I was a total weenie. I had tried some other OCTs here and there, bouncing from project to project, but I ended up taking a pretty extended break from art & OCTs. Once I went back to give Void a try though, I got to know some of the veterans from there a bit. In particular, me and Piñata had a battle and I had a lot of fun working with her. I think I disappeared for a bit more from the internet, but Piñata reached out when Oculama was becoming a thing, and I joined The Inaugural tourney with Didi, and the rest is cartoon violence history!

Whew, well, on the positive side, I’m much better with time management now (Yay diagnosed ADHD!), so I’m much better at having a reasonable idea of what I can do by the deadline. You couldn’t tell the first two rounds, but I promise, it’s true!

This tournament was way harder for me than anticipated, mostly due to life things outside the tournament. During round 1, we had to put my cat Dean down. He was 16, it was definitely his time, but it was still really hard. Ironically enough, his brother Hank passed towards the end of the Black Diamond tournament. They were the only two in their litter and I had them their whole lives. Hank passing was hard, but Dean passing felt a lot more like the end of an era. I got Oculama tattoos for them, since they died during both Diamonds, and they died in the tournament corresponding to their color. It was really nice having a concise symbol to use, so hey thanks guys ♥

As the tournament went on, I also found out a family friend that helped raise me has a pretty bad cancer, and my job is regularly pretty stressful and oh my gosh, did she refuse to relent. I was as surprised as anyone to find myself in the finals, let alone winning! It really means a lot to me that I was still able to do this with everything I’ve had going on. Having the tournament to focus on was a lovely distraction if a bit more added stress, but I’m really thankful I had it to work on.

My finale was shorter on the script than I usually like, but it was specifically so I could make sure I had something polished to present, since I knew Ninja would be going hard, and I knew I had even less space than usual to work on it. I’m glad that I was able to pull it together! I’m usually really super critical of myself and my work, but I was really proud of the work I did in my finale. Having it also win is really validating and meaningful to me, I really can’t thank all of you enough!

Honestly, mostly really good timing! I poked my way back to the site in time for the Summer collab comic, right before sign ups for the White Diamond opened! So I guess if I had to say specifically, it was the Discord server summoning Malibu Didi that brought Tembel back to life.

I came in with a general framework of how I loosely wanted Tembel’s story arc to go, him ending up in Hell. Beyond that, I try to be pretty loosey goosey and see what story beats my opponents bring me. Every character has a different reason to be there, and I like to try to pay as much respect to my opponents as possible, and tell a good story for them as well. Even if, or especially if, a character is something that’s way out of my usual wheelhouse, it’s so fun incorporating someone else’s story into your own. I like continuity, I love looking to characters’ backstory or past comics for how to move forward. If I’m battling someone, I’m reading all of that character’s comics, I want to be able to write the character as authentically as I can.

Round 1 was a doozy, Sophi, Karl, and Tembel were SUCH different characters, it took me a bit to figure out how to incorporate everyone. Xeno had done a comic after The Double Black Diamond featuring all the characters from that tourney that died, and it gave me a great base to jump off of, while Karl’s Las Vegas afterlife was a cool setting to use! Him being a bugman instead of a gambler threw me for a bit of a loop, but I mean, Karl was cool with it, so I didn’t stress out too much.

Round 2 was a lot of fun for me, King had this whole shadow organization to work with, I wanted to do more to link Veil’s nefarious operations with the baddies in Heaven, but you saw how that got squished down into a flashback in round 3. I feel bad I didn’t get to give her a proper send off, but King was very fun to work with!

Round 3, poor sweet Sera, I went through and read all of her comics and just wanted her to have something nice. I knew I wouldn’t have time to do a flashy finale with a lot of action, so I opted for something more subdued, with more quiet character moments. I had to add more exposition since I wasn’t able to put it in round 2 and properly end Tembel’s story, but I wanted Sera to shine. I wanted her to be able to make herself her own nice little party, and make cute outfits with her sewing skills she had been showing off, and have a good ending. I left the ending for her open to interpretation on purpose, I didn’t want to dictate where she is, I just wanted to make sure she was happy T__T

Constantly evolving! The cool thing about making comics is every comic you do you learn something that works better for the next one. It’s an attitude that I learned from comic battles that’s helped me everywhere else in my life.

I always try to spend my first day brainstorming, reading my opponent’s comics, and making sure I give myself space to not just jump on the first idea I have. Usually I try to come up with just an outline, or a plot summary, and flesh it out with thumbs or sketches. My thumbs are usually super loose, I’m just trying to figure out the pacing and the layouts. I’ve never written a proper script, that idea stresses me out.

“Scripting” with my thumbs works for my brain because it helps me figure out how the pages will flow, if it’s all written out I have a way harder time with it. I always also try to leave wiggle room, there’s always room for better ideas later. Dialogue I usually have very rough ideas for, and develop as I work on the comic. If I’m doing the lettering digitally especially, I’ll edit the phrasing of a word bubble right up until I’m posting. I really like writing dialogue, using it to flesh out the characters, showcase their personality, throw in dumb jokes. Just the WAY people say things can tell you a lot about them!

Starting in round 2 this tourney, I did my pages traditionally on paper with brush pens, and then for round 3 I colored digitally! Doing the lines traditional, I couldn’t fudge the dialogue as much as I usually like to, but I wanted to be sure I knew where the bubbles were going and how the art had to adapt around them.

Working traditionally for the lines ended up really improving my workflow! I tend to agonize over making all of my lines perfect digitally, really trying to polish everything and thus sucking the life out of it. Traditional, I just kind of have to roll with the punches and mercifully can’t zoom in to 400% to shave off the crooked part of a line I’ve already drawn 8 times. It’s great. It really let me cruise along and not fret over every little mistake.

I also like coloring traditionally, I usually use alcohol markers and colored pencils, but I wanted to make sure these pages could be done, so it was all digital. I used a limited color palette, just 5 colors. Whenever I color anything now I try to use a limited palette haha, it helps everything from going off the rails!

And then I used halftone layers with a layer mask for shading and to get different colors, and a couple noise overlays to help lean into the ‘rough old school comic’ aesthetic everything else was giving. I used rougher brushes to help fit in with the texture of the traditional lines for the colors, even with the masks on the half tones. It helps give you those imperfections. I tend to abuse overlays and special effects layers, but I was trying to keep things at least unobtrusive, if not actually simple!

This is what my layers look like! Coloring the way I did with these halftones meant I could just copy the layers and then mask it for where I wanted it page by page. Honestly, I’m excited to tinker with the process and see how wacky I can get with it!

SO MUCH! I don’t have much WIP-wise, in a tournament I try not to do too much ‘pre-work’ between rounds, like designing characters or environments, it feels like cheating! And then during the draw time, I try to focus on stuff I can actually put in the comic. It is kind of impossible to turn off once I know who my next potential opponents are though, so I just kind of let my wheels spin up in the ol’ noggin. Plus, if I end up losing, then I’ve got free ideas for later! Win win! Well, lose win, I guess.

My initial plan to get Tembel damned was having the Cherubs be basically like, the lower class of Heaven, forced to do all the dirty work while the Archangels be running the place like a mafia, more or less. That’s why in Round 1, Tembel is teleporting into Cherubtown, which is in the sewer, outside of the fancy golden city. Tembel was going to incite a riot and that was going to be what got him sent to Hell. It was going to be class warfare the whole time! The Archangel Michael was going to be the ringleader, and a real jerk, and Tembel was going to steal his flaming sword and just straight up become the Disgaea protagonist my heart always wanted to make him anyways.

Round 2 saw the biggest cuts, mainly because I couldn’t finish the comic. Tembel and King were going to full on fight those children, and then King was going to chase after the caretaker of the orphanage, with Tembel holding them off. King was going to discover a plot between Veil and the Archangels, with them letting Veil do all kinds of nasty stuff with peoples’ souls, reincarnating them and experimenting on them. The caretaker of the orphanage was going to set the place to self destruct, knowing she, King, and the children would be back in Veil’s grasp. King and Tembel were gonna save the kids, with Tembel going back to confront the Archangels, and King was going to adopt the orphans.

Round 3 I went into telling myself I could ONLY do 10 pages (we all see how that worked out), so I kind of nipped a lot of stuff in the bud in the writing phase. Mostly if I had more time, I would have put in an action sequence when the angels got there. I think I still would have sent Sera away before, she’s fought enough. That girl deserves a break.

HI FUN FACT I’m terrible at social media, I have accounts but I almost never use them. I dream of sharing art, but I’m lousy at the consistency the algorithms demand from you lol

A MORE FUN FACT I got married to my husband and our wedding was a costume party. We were Carmen Sandiego and Where is Waldo! This was last year so it’s not new news, I just think he’s neat: