What follows is our thoughts on "R-Hammer - Chapter 1: Spiritsmith"

G.Yuki comments__________
The first chapter of R-Hammer, man, how times have changed!

Originally I pitched this idea as a long form series to Betofu, but I was still SUPER green when it came to working on graphic novels (this was actually only the second one I had worked on, haha!). I didn’t understand the need for consistent average page count per chapter (I just wrote until I reached a nice stopping point) and I actually didn’t even do the placement of dialogue bubbles back then (or throughout a majority of R-Hammer’s run . . . thank you for putting up with me friend! ; -; ).

As this was the introduction to the series, I wanted to focus on our protagonist, Rossolyn, and show off the kind of person she was while hinting at various elements in the story. Fun fact: the inciting incident (a possessed knife terrorizing a housewife) was actually heavily inspired by one of the earliest moment in Thousand Arms, an original Playstation-era RPG that I am a HUGE fan of. So much so that the fact its protagonist, Meis Triumph, was a “Spirit Blacksmith” influenced Rossolyn’s creation.

Rossolyn carries a hammer but you were never meant to see her do real harm with it, she only ever uses it on Spirits and it is never to “attack” them but rather cleanse them of any bad energies causing them to go haywire! I wanted a non-aggressive protagonist who valued life (even those not mortal) but could still be the center of an action-adventure story, similar to Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender. This is why the first thing you see is Rossolyn just doing her job, and a pretty menial one at that (fixing a frying pan!? lol).

I really want to revisit her story one day . . .

Betofu comments__________
Man, how long has it been, like 2-3 years?

I don’t think I have to much interesting insight on all this, probably just be something like “I like drawing X thing, yeah becuz is cool and stuff yeehaaa”

Ahem… anyways-

One of my favorite panels is on Page 3, last panel, I just like how the expression came out, and how she’s handling the goggles. Another thing I really like were the crowd shots, even though they take a lot of time to do, I enjoy doing designs for all the people there, and make them different to each other.

I love the sequence on page 15, the knife reflection and the hand covering the panel, when I read that on the script I was looking forward to draw it.

The last page means a lot to me, it was the first comic I’ve actually finished, and by that I mean inks, tone. If it wasn’t for this work with Raven, I probably would have taken a different path with drawing, so yeah, still growing pains for both, but we are still learning and hopefully the improvement can be seen with each chapter.

I'm not sure if anyone is reading this, but hello all the same~

So today we re-posted the first chapter of R-Hammer, our (G.Yuki and Betofu) first collaborative work together with a revised script and typsetting and resolution optimized for digital displays.

But why? Simple, in a month (on May 14 to be exact) we will be launching our latest graphic novel project, 7 Heirs, and in the lead up to that we wanted to show some life and reflect on what lead us here. So we hope you enjoy re-reading our first efforts, or maybe experience them for the first time!

Each upload will also come with a blog post comprised of comments from us (though maybe only I am excited about that lol)