Oculama

Oculama.com held the Hypoxemia Tournament earlier this year - a "betrayal" tag tournament where the winners would be forced to face each other down in a heartbreaking final round. At the end of the long road was website regulars, Doe and Ninja. Their comics were an ideal combination of art and storytelling within the theme and now we're finally able to sit down with both of them for an interview.

Doe: I’ve been making comics since February 2019, so it's been a significant part of my life. I was really drawn towards deviantart as a teen, and while scrolling through the site, I came across promo material for an OCT called “One Year Journey”. I made an audition comic for it, and while I didn't get in, the experience made me want to draw more comics and branch out to other OCTs.

Ninja and I hadn't collaborated before Hypoxemia, but we have fought twice on the site. We intended to team up in an earlier event— The Double Black Diamond tournament— but complications arose towards the end of sign-ups.

Ninja: I’ve been doing comics since July 2021, with War for Rayuba, so we just missed my 5 year anniversary of being in the OCT scene. Of course I did comics back in elementary school after reading captain underpants like everyone else, but those were not good, and something I forgot about completely for like a decade or 2 afterwards.

In terms of working together. This is actually our first time working together on comics. We’ve fought a few times on Oculama before as everyone should know, cause those comics are absolute BANGERS. While this is our first time making comics collaboratively, it almost wasn’t. We were first looking to enter into Double Black Diamond as a team but unfortunately things came up and we had to put our collaborative efforts on hold.

Doe: I think I appreciate a collaborative partner that keeps communication open and has a certain level of patience. It's nice to have someone I can safely talk to and provide feedback to without fear of upsetting them.

In general I am very easily distracted and very easily overwhelmed, so having a partner that can help keep me on track and is willing to cover for me when I run out of stream is great; It makes the process more fun and less stressful.

Ninja: I ve had a few collaborative partners in the past and I think I ve always appreciated someone who s willing to be flexible but also has complete trust in their partner. It s also always nice when your partner is able to make up for what my own art and comics lack. In this case, Doe was absolutely a life saver with their line art and hatching. I do believe it helped us win a couple of the closer rounds, and made those comics look way better than if I was doing everything solo. .

It s actually funny, one of the main reasons as to why I wanted to team up with Doe was their shading and colouring we saw in Doe s first round of Double Trouble. It s something we wanted to do in Double Black Diamond. We didn t get to do it during Hypoxemia, but it was always in the back of my mind, a could have been that would have made our rounds even more interesting.

Doe: Be open to feedback. I feel like the most important aspect of every collaboration is learning from the people you work with; When one partner closes themselves to feedback, communication becomes more hostile and tense, and you can’t really build each other up because of that lack of trust.

I think it’s also worth analyzing the methods your collab partner uses when making comics. Maybe you’ll find something that will help you in the long run! This is mostly advice for beginner artists, but I think more advanced artists also ought to learn from others, too.

Ninja: Be as flexible as possible. Every collaboration that I consider to have been a success lived and thrived off of the two of us being as flexible as possible. Once someone isn’t willing to bend and work with what the other person wants to do, is the moment in which it fails. Even if it wasn’t a part of our game plan going into the tournament Doe and I would keep an open mind to new possibilities and help out when it's needed. A big example of this would be in our Round 3, where I had to give up colours and tried my hardest to emulate Does style (not very well LOL). We weren’t going to get it done in time if we hadn’t made those sacrifices and worked together.

Doe: It’s a combination of everything I mentioned before; Having someone you can learn from, who you can also bounce ideas with, who is there to lift you when you are down, and most importantly: Who is there to help you finish that work no matter what. I did go through some hardships in this tournament because I wanted to give it my all for the lineart, and I already had a very limited schedule to begin with (Being a full-time university student is no joke), but Ninja was always there for me and we always got that comic done— Despite having to give up colors in the semi-finals. I only wish I had had more time in my schedule to work on that betrayal round, because I wanted it to be a culmination of all my feelings about our collaboration— That I had fun and I enjoyed talking to and working with Ninja greatly :)

Ninja: I think just having someone else there with you along the way is always going to be a benefit. You’ve got someone who is able to bounce ideas off of and is able to help when you’re in those tighter spots. Plus I got a fair bit of a break during rounds when Doe was working through the line art. But mainly the support system that a good partner can provide. Even when we hit that betrayal round we were still there for each other and checking in on our comics, pushing each other towards the finale. Normally I’m pretty silent when it comes to my opponents, hell I said very few things to the duos up to the finale, but Doe and I had gone through so much anyways that it felt weird not being there for each other and talking through the round.

Doe: Sort of. From the beginning I wanted to subvert the premise of the tournament; It's very easy to write a story about an alien who pretends to be a human just to kill or eat people, but not many people have explored how the alien would feel coming into human society, getting to know humanity, forming connections with the very beings they prey on.

I wanted to explore that through Mopie.

When Ninja presented his character idea to me (plus an early sketch of EFFI), everything came together quite nicely. Having two characters who are outsiders to humanity (a robot and an alien), and who are both coming to terms with all these new emotions they’re experiencing? That concept had a lot of potential to me, so I thought of ways in which Mopie’s and EFFI’s character arcs could go, and shared them with Ninja.

I didn't have an exact ending in mind until the semi-finals. I figured at that point that EFFI wouldn't kill Mopie, so maybe I could have her sacrifice herself.

Ninja: It’s very interesting, Doe had the idea of our character arcs pretty early on, so I’ll let Doe handle that part. But I had a gameplan for the finale from very early on. At the end of round 1 I decided that Mopaz must survive, and I wasn’t going to let EFFI die so I started my big ole master plan to get it all to work out. Doe was very gracious to let me write all the comics which let me lead both Mopie and EFFI through the development that Doe had set up but also the steps I needed to introduce in order to pull off Oculama’s first death heist.

EFFI’s constant scanning, introducing the chips needed to find Mopie, separating the two gals and having Mopie’s escape shuttle ready and set up. It was extra fun because I kept this a secret from Doe up until the final round in which I just straight up told them my final plan on the first day of the finale. I think the piece de resistance of the entire thing is within how we handled the actual Mopaz. Obviously she had died long before the events of Hypoxemia but I kept the actual death until Mopaz needed to die. You see the glimpse of it beforehand in every comic we have, it’s our one constant flashback hinting at Mopaz’s non-human nature, but that final moment doesn’t happen until the very end. As you can see here, Mopaz has one mole, Mopie has two.

So technically I did kill Mopaz, and Mopie who everyone loves gets to survive and eventually find her robot girlfriend swimming through space waiting for her. Speaking of that in particular, I do have ideas to keep going with these two characters. Fascinating as you said, this is a tournament built with that dreadful betrayal endgame, and we all knew about it going in, but Doe and I ended it with our characters closer together, at the end of it all we fought as artists but couldn’t really break the characters up.

Doe: Honestly, for me? Not much. For round 1 I was picturing more interactions between Lenard and Mopaz, but I’m pretty satisfied with what Ninja came up with. In round 2 I thought about having Owens also be an alien, so him and Mopaz could have an interesting interaction through the greenhouse door; but keeping him as a regular house cat was a good call— Made the story all the more tragic. Round 3 had pretty much everything I wanted to include in it, executed even better than what I imagined.

Ninja: I cut my entire storyline for EFFI. Truth be told I kept this a secret from Doe and was going to reveal this in the final round, but as the story kept going, and seeing how excited Doe was about the beautiful yuri we were writing I decided against it. The gist of my original EFFI story was going to be a reveal about EFFI being an alien, someone who is threatened by Mopaz the alien trying to become more human and being scared about revealing their own identity and stopping their plans. It’s something that I was hiding in EFFI becoming more sentient, which would have actually been just the alien slowly dropping the persona of EFFI and losing the mask they were performing. I was really excited for that reveal, EFFI was going to ask Mopaz why a robot who doesn’t need to breathe needed to wear a helmet at all times. I do believe switching to keeping EFFI an actual robot and having her deal with her humanity and this emerging relationship with the alien Mopaz was a much stronger choice but I do miss having such a twist.

In terms of the actual story I got very lucky with my own writing, and how our opponents played out because I didn’t really need to cut anything. I had some slight plans for Anna Anana and Katabasis, and Rafael and Renato, but ultimately all my brainworms were for who we ended up getting for opponents. Which is so unbelievably lucky, I don’t think I’ve ever had a tournament in which I got my perfect run of opponents who ended up working so well together.

Ninja: https://bsky.app/profile/mrtheninja.bsky.social On bluesky
Doe: https://bsky.app/profile/dedoedoedoedo.bsky.social On bluesky