the new Godfeels chapter has been out for a few days! while it's not the first chapter to use images or spritework, it's the first that I think really shows off a lot of what we want to do moving forward. the new chapter can be found here if you haven't read it yet:
so one of the things we've talked about a lot in the Godfeels work server is wanting to develop our own language and techniques to push Homestuck spritework forward formally. we're thinking a lot about the camera placement within more detailed and experimental sets as a storytelling tool. so, rather than sticking to Homestuck's traditional slightly-off-orthographic perspective, @girlpillz put together this amazing expansive set of the park that bends back in a sort of fish eye perspective. this let Sarah move the sprites around and resize both them and the camera to get more dramatic effects.
but it also had some interesting emergent formal properties that resulted in some pretty good gags: (spoilers for the chapter under the cut)
there's a few images in the chapter that are about 1.5x or 2x the height of a typical Homestuck panel. they're used in the chapter for practical effect, showing some characters breaking off from one another into individual conversational groups, in different parts of the map or set. I think they also tend to have some interesting formal properties. like, the size of the Homestuck Panel is pretty baked into readers' brains at this point and functions in a similar way to the grid in say an Alan Moore comic. when we get a 2x height panel, then, we might tend to see it as two regular Homestuck panels. (and actually, I talked with Sarah at one point about whether it'd be worthwhile to break the tall panels up into two smaller ones!) so I think when you get a page composition like this:
it suggests a kind of focal shift that mirrors the spatial one. we're moving from Padua and Silverbark's argument back down to the other characters watching and commenting on them. the camera has moved down to focus in on-
wait hold on there's drama happening
this is sort of a subtler version of the Homestuck classic "PSYCH!" panels, where the story would abruptly shift mid-action to some other bozo instead of the ostensible focus character. Karkat even accentuates this with an image-only "HEY!"--he doesn't get to say it in dialogue because the dialogue focus has already shifted back upstage to the argument between Padua and Silverbark. so the language of the comic that feels implied by the camera motion and panel design gets subverted immediately for a joke at Karkat's expense, another longstanding Homestuck tradition (sorry Karkat).
the intuitive form ends up reasserting itself at the conclusion of Jade and Padua's argument, when Jasprose reappears and drops the still drunk Jake into the middle of the other characters. the camera just seems to obligingly go where the Lalondes want it to! how convenient for them.
this isn't necessarily revolutionary or super flashy stuff, but I think it's a fun subtle example of how shaking up the formula of Homestuck's formatting is letting us work in some good gags and interesting storytelling techniques. the visual and comics achievements of Homestuck have always been grossly under-examined in favor of more traditional lit crit (which tbqh you could honestly say is a problem with comics theory as a whole, especially when non comics theorists deign to notice and talk about comics.....) and I hope what we're doing here gets people talking about and thinking about how much formal space the comic really opened up, and how little of it subsequent works have explored!
