🙆‍♂️ OVERVIEW

sad sack 1: so much for the tolerant left

NICK: straight & to the point murderporn starring 5 hot tops and "fleisch," the proud boy loser who'd been giving jake trouble offscreen for a minute prior to this. this whole thing began as a oneshot called "so much for the tolerant left" actually, & i think i got about halfway done with the roughs for it before realizing i was too curious about what the perpetrators' individual damage was to just leave it at that, & the title got demoted to a chapter name. also you can really tell this is fiction not cus of the lack of immediate police investigation but because there arent 5 tops in the entire tristate area.

the plan for tolerant left was to lure the audience in & get them to root for these 5 morons because the choice of victim was so easily to brush off and condemn, & everybody who read it did exactly what id hoped theyd do! which came in handy in the later books.

garv is conspicuously absent from the epilogue.

RJ: SMFTTL was my first proper shot at purely black&white art, its process actually started mid or late 2018 with many breaks in between page batches (this was before it really sunk into us that people were going to want to buy it and read it) so naturally, this is the chapter that lacks the most in the art department and that i would love to remake one day, but simultaneously there's some nostalgia that comes from looking at these flawed, carefree experiments i did, not to mention some pretty great examples of movement and weird angles that i have no clue how i pulled off at the time.

the characters themselves are also just coming to life, i didnt even think to differentiate skin tone back then and i remember that for a second we struggled to assert garv's & sal's ethnicity to the people who wanted to draw them without coming across as ungrateful (which is another thing we didn't expect to happen so early) malik, also, was someone whose look changed quite a bit since.

sad sack 2: a small plot of land

NICK: title comes from a david bowie track off his album "outside" which has to be my favorite record of his. sal's center stage & having everybody match outfits with him as part of their freakshow M.O. was both weirdly charming to me & also just incredibly weird. the words “a small plot of land” evoke island imagery for me; an island's surrounded by water + the guys set out some bait and catfished their victim, so our child porn consumer victim here's called "fish" - but really the word "fish" got chosen because sal's endgame was to gut the guy like one. plot of land is the shortest book in SadS because i had the least fun with it out of all of them & just wanted to get through it as fast as possible, given the grotesque subject matter. i think i wound up actually taking a month-long break in the middle of the roughs for this cus i was like GOD I NEED TO STEP AWAY FROM THIS FOR A SECOND.

for this one also, i started pulling back in time in the opening to a little before the murder so we had a few pages of Prior Life instead of starting in medias res. audience-wise, the choice of victim was still easy to condemn, but now the goalpost has been moved a bit in that fish wasnt someone that did something directly to sal in the same way that fleisch directly harassed jake offscreen prior to tolerant left; ideally, the audience is still onboard for the bloodshed & hasnt noticed the shift.

garv sends a text to the wrong recipient(s) in the epilogue about an upcoming date.

RJ: despite the heavy topic i actually had a lot of fun with this chapter. the tone of it with its many strange pauses and moments of awkward stillness punctuated by horrific (but nonsexual) violence is something i've grown really fond of depicting since. there are some really strong scenes in this one, especially towards the end, that you can more clearly see how they evolved onto the series' final style. An interesting thing that ended up happening is that since everyone's face was covered, a lot more detail went into bodies & clothing that i think gave a more realistic and unique look to this chapter in particular.

This is also where Sal's appearance was really cemented, and where i kind of discovered a love for not only his character but drawing his huge self, which isnt a body type i had been used to doing prior to this.

The epilogue in this one was one of my favorites to draw & color even if my skill wasnt all there yet. sal's and stone's final interaction speaks volumes and, its my opinion at least, that salvatore's "end smile" panel sets itself apart from the other ones slightly. though thats for you to interpret ;)

sad sack 3: snuff machinery

NICK: the title for this one comes from a very well known track by german electo-industrial group [:SITD:] from like 2002 i think? malik's expressions were a delight to play with in this, & i loved drawing him swapping “masks” so frequently from panel to panel with such dexterity only to have that all start falling apart as his anxiety took hold. i really loved picking at mal & trying to push the character into a corner where he wouldnt be able to keep the panic at bay, & the page where hes struggling to light his cigarette while clearly having a poorly-masked panic attack is my favorite page in this book.

for this one the amount of pages before the murder was lengthened even further, & the choice of victim (the date rapist "face," named for what was about to get fucked & then bashed in) made a little more flimsy with the involvement of malik's sister jewel. snuff machinery was the turning point in SadS where i really hoped it began to feel like the guys were having trouble believing their own excuses, & where i REALLY hope the audience would have a moment with themselves of similar wrestling with trying to excuse what they just witnessed under the same logic as the fleisch and fish murders, ie still a deserving party even if the details were "a little sloppy."

garv mentions just before the murder begins that he's annoyed that he had to reschedule his date for their gore party.

RJ: the art REALLY took a turn for the better here both in the introduction AND main course. the shiny neon scheme of the bar in contrast to the grimy but equally colorful bathroom scene are some of my absolute favorites in the whole series *and i have no idea how i did them.* speaking of color, another interesting moment was the live shift that happened in the basement marking malik's arrival, which illustrates a more purposeful use of the coloring choices that goes beyond aesthetical, and later came into play very explicitly in BOG.

this chapter is when I finally started using grays to differentiate the characters' skin tones and outfits, both to address ethnic ambiguity and to make it easier on the reader's eyes, a complaint we got for parts 1 & 2. this is also where we see Malik's character design reach its final form, resulted from Nick taking to drawing his features slightly more rounded and giving him sharp cat eyes in a couple of panels in the preliminary pages, the look was so striking that we decided to make it a permanent staple of his, and thankfully this realization came to us as i was editing the finals for Part 1, so i had the chance to implement that feature to the best of my abilities from the start-- though obviously, they stand out in part 3 the most.

sad sack 4: a.m.f.

NICK: an a.m.f. (aka an "adios motherfucker") is a blue-colored derivative of a long island ice tea, & it’s made with like 7 or 8 shots of different liquors designed to get you fucked up as fast as humanly possible. our victim is "feast," as explained by stone at the diner; i really liked finally getting to show their premeditation, & i hope the implication was that theyd been premeditating in similar fashions prior to each murder & that this is just the first time we're seeing them go through this process onscreen.

this i think is really where everybody's excuses fell to pieces, because the opening sequence of outside life is enormous & almost more evocative than the murder sequence itself, & stone's poor behavior along with everybody involved's logical fallacies & callousness are just on full display. i wanted the audience uncomfortable at this point but still in a sense choosing to participate by reading it, & i hope that it felt like the hill a reader had been going down in 1 through 3 had turned into a very steep very slippery drop without them realizing what was happening.

garv's date goes terribly at the beginning of this book & it cracks me up how upset he gets when he gets corrected

RJ: so, a.m.f. was a monster to complete, and at the same time that it is the most frustrated a chapter has made me it was also the most satisfying to finish. with 92 pages in color (without including the epilogue) full of environments to fill in with the city and interior of the places they frequented, i was lucky if i could get 2 pages done in a day. the coloring has its ups and downs as with everything, but im overwhelmingly satisfied with it and it set me far ahead in regards to drawing and coloring backgrounds and objects.

the murder proceeds similar to snuff machinery's style with the addition of skin blotches to showcase everyone's inebriated state-- and if you've kept up with my art, you know i havent looked back since when it comes to the use of that effect. god, i remember thinking that everybody being naked would ease the workload, but not only did i get lost on detailing everybody's body hair but i forgot to consider the elaborate way in which they display the victim-- which put me in a place of having to pay extra attention to placement and angles, since everybody was pretty much using a dude as a table the whole time and inflicting injuries upon him that would have to stay consistent from panel to panel, as he didnt move around at all.

that said, this chapter was a blast. there's several panels, pages, and whole sequences that im over-the-moon proud of myself for the job i did, and one or two that frustrated so bad i would almost cry lmao. it was my biggest artistic challenge yet and i learned heaps from it, it also has whats probably the biggest amount of post-prelim edits, with the addition of pages and panels and significant page rework that we did to make things more interesting.

maybe my favorite page of the whole series (p.229) belongs in this chapter! and even that is by a close call.

sad sack 5: bog

NICK: the word "bog" is the word for "god" in a bunch of slavic languages, & im pretty sure it was the word for "god" in a clockwork orange as well. "femme" is pretty self explanatory. i love how fucking stupid garv is in this & how much of a puppetmaster he thinks he's being, he's Totally under the assumption that he can bullshit his way through forcing the rest of the group to enact his murder & has like absolutely no contingency plan for if something goes sideways. i was also the most excited to get to bog cus i couldnt wait to draw all of garv's expressions & face journeys; he always made the most fun faces to draw out of all of the dudes.

the plan here wasnt that the opening of bog was the pre-murder pullback similar to 2 through 4's steps back in time in the opening, but that books 1 through 4 were actually the preamble of bog all along. i think garv might be my favorite piece of shit out of the 5 pieces of shit because hes the only one to point out the elephant in the room & like Technically Isn't Wrong about the whole thing, & like - hey he's an unintelligent psychopath but at least he's upfront about it! (like that's in any way a good thing LOL) i love writing characters' big clever schemes & plans, but what i love even more than that is writing characters' deeply stupid schemes that fall to pieces. writing everybody panicking & then making poor decision after poor decision in this as the situation crumbled was just a blast.

also when i wrote garv doing karaoke (which was gonna feature a tyler the creator track right up until the very last second when it got swapped out for iron butterfly), after RJ inked it & it was finished i cant look at that sequence without becoming fully overwhelmed by secondhand embarrassment

RJ: here's a fun fact, BOG has 275 pages of story, and initially, *i* wanted them all to be in full color(except for the 5 or so pages where jake meets garv in the basement, right before the lights come on). nick thankfully swooped in with the idea to interpose black&white pages between color pages for narrative purposes, and little did i know how thankful i'd be for that later.

still, 154 pages out of the 275 total ended up getting a full paint job, and many more had color inserted in them (besides the usual gore) in one shape or another. there would have been more had i not thrown in the towel at the end of the arm breaking sequence. thats right! my initial plan was for the B&W pages to only return at the very end after the murder was over, but the color work was grueling and i just didnt want to do it anymore. and after i expressed that we quickly realized that, in a way, going back to uninterrupted B&W after that point would make a lot of sense, plus provide some interesting continuity to the style of spiritual sequels we have planned. i had to really learn to simplify my process in BOG (something i have always struggled with) and you can see that happen live as you read through it-- the final color sequence came out great, and i think i was able to sufficiently differentiate it from the bright world of the introductions and epilogues.

BOG had its own sets of challenges and while there's a lot i wish i had done differently (there always is) thats a perspective i could only reach thanks to all the experimentation and trial and error the chapter put me through-- in other words, its a perspective thats only possible because i made myself finish it. made myself move on even when i was feeling nit-picky. I would rather carry that experience over to the next project than spend another half a year redoing pages chasing after some imaginary perfection that i wouldnt achieve, anyway.

and of course, i say all that but BOG is still probably the best looking chapter of the series. just like A.M.F. looks a little better than SNUFF MACHINERY, and so on. any dissatisfaction i have is mostly due to absurd standards i set for myself for this finale.

also none of the porn i've ever drawn even comes close to how embarrassed i felt drawing that karaoke sequence. hell, i still cant believe this series about snuff murder has 2 karaoke sequences.