After a multi-starship race across the stars towards the mysterious wish-granting comet, Jericho, our galactic adventurers have whittled down round by round to an interdimensional vampire and the last alien of its kind. We're sitting down with the duo behind these characters creators to get a peek at their process and a bit of the animated magic behind Raven and Tio'Naia's journey to a victory full of hope more than wishes.
Rivana: I work as a software programmer/analyst but I always loved drawing since I was a kid. At 30, I decided to self-study art and now do it as a hobby/freelance. I think I started dabbling into comics around 2011 but there's a bunch of long hiatus here and there while I work on improving my art. Meeting Piñata and Eric has led me to Oculama and I was given the honor to be part of the staff.
PyrasTerran: I’ve been participating in comics battles and tournaments since 2008; I spent most of my comics life in enterVoid where I produced 120+ comics and 1500+ pages in my time there. I recently migrated fully to Oculama to spend some time in a new environment and try new things in the OC comics league space.
Rivana: I've collaborated with Pyras many times in the past so when he asked me if I wanted to team up with him for Comet Chasers, I immediately accepted with no second thoughts. I knew we could cook up a great story together between Tio and Raven especially after he shared his story ideas with me. Comet Chasers is also my first comic tournament and the competitive side of me really wanted to bring my best on the table. I couldn't think of a better collab partner to team up with.
PyrasTerran: I felt a spark to join Comet Chasers given how thematically in tune the concept was with Tio’naia’s narrative standing as an alien survivor of a genocide; why wouldn’t someone like them take a crack at this? The ideas started filling my head and I just needed to find a partner. Rivana and I had collaborated many times in the past and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for both of us to break into an Oculama tournament for the first time. We are very comfortable working together so the cooperative process would be the easiest part of this challenge.
Tio’naia and Raven paired in unexpectedly serendipitous ways; Raven’s previous romantic partner was a psychic alien (she clearly has a type) but for me, in the past few years in comics competitions I’ve been very interested in flipping the script of the norm for a chosen theme/team dynamic. So instead of having Raven and Tio join forces as one usually does in a team tournament, we started brainstorming how we can actually have them be opponents while chasing after this comet.
PyrasTerran: Tio’Naia was the first character I made for OC comic battling in years without much of a catalog of comics before to fall back on, a lot of who they were was as much a journey of discovery for me as it was for the readers.
The appeal of alien characters for me is the opportunity to have fun with cultural exploration, write new histories for a fictional people and think about how those histories define a society on a speculative galactic level. I had a lot of fun with the world-building for this tournament (maybe too much fun) and was lucky to have a partner who supported my runaway brainstorming and helped decide how much to drip feed into each round.
Of course, none of the world-building would be too interesting if it didn’t tie back to real personal and emotional experiences, and there are few more universal and resonant than that of grief over the loss of a loved one. This core emotion was the guiding star that all the lore and exposition orbited around, what it all informs and leads to, and I hope this was more successful than not with the readers.
Rivana: Interestingly, Raven is the opposite of Tio's. She's got many years of written story/comics before the events of Comet Chasers. I am not much into world building (I leave all that to Pyras lol) but I am more into character building. Pyras and I have been writing stories together with Raven for a few years now and he knows Raven like one of his own. We took Raven's experiences and growth over the years to explore how she would navigate through this new situation and people around her. What could've been a daunting task writing a character who has a complex (I'd even say convoluted) history behind her turned out to be smooth sailing because we trust each other with these characters.
Raven was at a point of her immortal life when she was starting to lose her humanity. Jericho's wish-granting abilities served as a tether to who she once was and what she did not have for a long time- Hope.
So for me, it was a balancing act of exploring who Raven was and who she has become. My hope is that her character resonated with some folks even without knowing her full history.
Rivana: For me, the core theme is the power of communication and empathy to resolve conflicts and misunderstandings. The outcome may not always match what we hoped for or expected. But what truly matters is how the characters choose to make peace (or not) with that reality, and the actions they take as a result. Personally, I don't normally aim for 'themes' whenever I write something. I usually start with an idea of what happens and see how the characters navigate through the situation presented to them (clearly a more 'impromptu' style I inherited from in-game RPs in the past) and take the outcome from that. Pyras balances it out by having a more holistic view of the story. He makes everything cohesive and, should I say, cinematic.
PyrasTerran: Conflict is something ingrained in the histories of both characters, Tio as a genocide survivor, and Raven’s bloody past through the many comics she’s been in since even before her Oculama career which are considered soft-canon to her place now. Likewise the premise of the tournament–a wish from a legendary comet–by making it a galactic setting invites us to imagine it as the galactic conflict it could grow into. We found that as the wish could be anything, it can thus be interchanged with any kind of resource that people fight over: land, wealth, security, power, retribution, whatever reason groups fight and take from each other. Conflict doesn’t have to be a direct action either (like the wizards of old who progressed their magic by having the galaxy rat race over a wishing star of their making) Thus the struggle of conflict is universal, something no wish could fix but still something every person has to contend with.
Throughout the tournament, Raven and Tio answer conflict with fight and flight, respectively; Raven tackles each challenge head on and meets perceived violence with more violence, even as she stacks wins and grows in power she is losing something important each time. Meanwhile Tio’s passive aggressive abstinence from the conflicts around them leaves conflicts to nonetheless escalate beyond control. In the end, both understand the value of selfless acts of thoughtful courage, fueled by empathy and intention, not just as a pragmatic tool but as a philosophy.
Although the story is very space sci-fi, there is an underlying current of spirituality and playing with theological concepts both surface level (walls of Jericho, Jonah’s divine inspiration within the colossal fish’s belly, the Evil Eye) and deeper (confronting Dark Forest Theory with thoughts on theological grace and absolution). Ko’Taian philosophy seeks to expose the universal goodness in all intelligent life, that all deserve a chance at atonement, and no one is beyond hope, and that there is strength in knowing that even if this does not pan out for everyone, that there is value in the venture all the same, if we are ever to find a way to end conflicts and still be able to live with ourselves afterwards.
Rivana: I’ll let Pyras answer this one. :)
PyrasTerran: The challenge we had was daunting; we wanted to tell a very big story but had a very strict timeline and had to figure out how to tell as much as possible while ensuring a manageable workload. Interlude comics in between rounds could only carry so much. Battling such offbeat characters in round one as Raincoat and the Big Wizard became a blessing in disguise: As we developed the Wizard’s Garden as a stylistic shortcut, we realized this is something we could implement every round in one way or another, and because this is the medium of comics, we can come up with any reason for it to happen and it will make sense for the story.
This helped immensely in Round 2 especially with helping readers digest a ton of exposition-heavy, politics-laden dialogue in a more visually interesting setting that also was itself informing of the conflict (a virtual chatroom became the perfect environment for people to speak to each other honestly or cruelly without fear of direct violence, just like in real life ((up to a point, as is revealed))).
By Round 3 we were able to get away with monochrome color schemes for half of the story not just because of the Round’s script but what we had conditioned our readers to expect up to this point.
Then we were able to pay it all back in the culmination of Raven and Tio’s reconciliation moment.
Beyond this there were many other little outside-the-box schemes we came up with to be able to keep up with the deadline while also balancing our crazy 40+ hour work schedules:
- I would draw the most visually complex pages first for Rivana to get started on, so she had time to give these pages the tender loving care they needed and by the home stretch we were blazing through the least demanding of pages to hit full completion.
- We took full advantage of the space setting and world-trotting each round to have backgrounds that read as complete and sensible even as they took very little time to create individually. Sometimes on days I could not deliver inks to Riv the goal was to start on backgrounds first as they did not often require my pen to be made.
- In our work hours we brainstormed our plans for how to tackle our remaining workload, so we always hit the ground racing.
Whether it was finishing the script fast or drawing pages or panels out of order, as long as we were doing something every day of the drawing period that was a success.
Rivana: Planning ahead really made a difference for us. Deciding between animated vs. static, or fully-rendered vs. a simpler style...these choices were made thoughtfully and applied exactly where they’d have the most impact, both visually and narratively. I also spend time picking the right color scheme and lighting to fit the mood of each scene. For example, I tend to go with muted or cooler colors for melancholic and peaceful moments, while warm, aggressive reds and oranges feel right for fight scenes. Same approach with the shadows and lighting.
PyrasTerran: I taught myself After Effects back in the day for work and kept up with it a little bit over the years for whenever I wanted to do fun little animations for my drawings or animatics. We played with it a little in our pre-tournament intro collab comic Impact Event, and of course my brain started to imagine how it could be used to illustrate elements of the story that would otherwise be difficult to portray as cinematically on static 2D panels. Each round had different thought processes; for Round 1 it was used for elevating the Wizard’s Garden, for Round 2 it was for heightening the drama of Raven’s attack, and in Round 3 we tried to keep it to the most intense moments: the battle in Act 3, and the climaxes of Acts 4 and 5. Most of these animation tricks I have done in the past but there were a few (like the portal loop) that I had to theorize in my head before I got a chance to implement it on page.
Animations were always left for last, technically a gamble because there was no guarantee they would come out as good as they did, I had to rely on my confidence with the software and planning concepts ahead in my mind (sort of like a sculptor planning a block of stone before they start chiseling) then praying they worked out in the last few days of the deadlines. There were some pages that needed to be built in ways where the layers would be ready to transfer to After Effects for the proper animation. Rivana put a lot of trust in me that these pages would look right when she delivered what looked like half-built assets for me to turn into a real panel.
Rivana: We planned how we're gonna tackle each page in every round. I did the coloring/rendering for the most part. I also did some pre-painting of space scenes/backgrounds and the various objects in the wizard's Community Garden to save us some time. Pyras had a lot of great ideas that minimized the rendering time without sacrificing the fidelity/quality of our pages. So that really helped us a lot.
PyrasTerran: Preparation, organization, and diligence were the Triforce for us to be able to get as much done as we needed. Because we had an idea of where we were going with the full story, we spent a lot of time in-between rounds brainstorming scenarios that could fit interchangeably with whoever we were facing, and when we had time even came up with the paths for each so we had a good idea of what we wanted to do when the timer started.
When the timer started, the first days were dedicated to writing the script as quickly as possible while Rivana built backgrounds, and once that was done we focused on all the most difficult pages first, which helped prevent burnout for the last days where we could get through easier pages with less exertion. Having the script finished fast gave us a solid road map for all decision-making down the line, a source to reference if we ever felt lost about where to go next.
Rivana: Create comics for the characters and stories you really want to tell. It's a lot of hard work. It requires discipline and consistency but also incredibly rewarding! Don't waste your time and energy working on a comic/story/characters you're not genuinely passionate about. Don't worry about audience or social media clout. Do things that bring you joy. The rest is just icing on the cake.
PyrasTerran:
- Never stop learning and doing new things! Don’t just read comics; read books (both fiction and non-fiction), watch movies outside your comfort genres, go to museums, take hikes, look at behind-the-scenes features, learn how things work, fill your brain with knowledge that can then become ammunition for your stories.
- Discipline is freedom! One of the most important skills you can learn for making comics is being able to finish a comic within a deadline. The more you can do this and the more you study on how to do this (including destroying perfectionist habits that only slow you down), the faster you will get, and the faster you are, the more you can do per comic over time. Over enough time passing, if you remain disciplined, you will develop a speed that others envy, that will give you the freedom to make more than others could in the same time period, the freedom to be able to refine your scripts and panels or change plotlines mid-round with time to spare. Like training a puppy early, this is hard work you have to put in for a consistent period of time that is guaranteed to pay off exponentially later in life.
Rivana: I wanted to do a full apocalyptic scenario with the nightmare theme at first lol. Based off of Eric and Arkeis' main plot in their comics, there was an idea I proposed to Pyras where Jericho actually crash landed in Junction and gave everyone's worst nightmares instead of wishes. We incorporated part of that idea in the final version.
Raven's ending was also different initially. She was supposed to make it to the ship and then be taken to prison for her crimes. I later on proposed to Pyras that it makes more sense for her to stay behind, especially after what happened to the Arretichans. "The Captain goes down with the ship." so to speak and I strongly felt that's what Raven would do. I also wanted to add the element of punishment/consequences for Raven beyond that: by having her suffer a possible perpetual state of becoming feral. A condition of her existence she feared all her life.
PyrasTerran: Although it was a foregone conclusion we were going to have a kaiju somewhere in the story, the original concept was a lot more pedestrian: the kaiju transformation of Jericho was going to happen in Round 2 as a sort of final trial that Comet Chasers had to overcome to get their wish (with the solution being allowing yourself to be devoured rather than trying to flee from the rampaging monster), and Round 3’s other world inside Jericho was still up in the air (ideas included a natural heavenly paradise, or a Ko’Taian secret civilization with Siyan or a twist-villain Mel’Solas appearing).
Things changed and got a lot more metaphysical after I spent time with Gorillaz’ latest album The Mountain, as the final song Sad God became Jericho’s theme track and I became far more interested in treating the kaiju element with an unknowable awe and majesty befitting something capable of cosmic power, something neither inherently malevolent or benign, but still beautiful in its own way. So too did the concept of the album in general (which was made after the artists reunited right after having lost loved ones in their lives) resonate with the emotions we wanted about life, love and loss in our comic. Any success we had in pushing wonder and emotion in Round 3 is partially thanks to discovering this album.
Rivana: I am not really good at keeping up with social media most of the time but my handle is @artofrivana over at Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky. I also have online shops here and there. You can find all these at: https://linktr.ee/artofrivana
PyrasTerran: I can be found active still on Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky and Tiktok, pretty much anywhere with the same name PyrasTerran. I hope to soon be putting all my experience into releasing a large personal solo project called “Astral Drift”, and I’ll still be around Oculama trying out some other new ideas. You may also see me with a tiny game dev crew making games in the future, starting with Crew: Expendable which can be found on Steam now. Rivana and I are planning a book-closing Epilogue chapter for Raven and Tio’s story in Comet Chasers so stay tuned for that as well!
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