Pain Response (Storyboard)

This will be one of the few patron-exclusives, since it's a Work-in-progress of a comic I'm planning to finish.

I was supposed to do a short story comic for 2018's Winstersday Zine, but unfortunately, my schedule got borked by higher-ups at work being unreasonable, an extremely delayed project being dumped on my head at the worst opportune moment, and the plain old bad luck that, among other things, included spending half past month at the vet's office to be one of the 5 people this year in our vet's area to bring in a dog with a stroke. So I contributed just a painted illustration instead (which I'll be able to show off pretty soon, too).

Since I wanted to do a story like this for quite some time now, I'm still planning to finish this (currently has lineart & lettering done, just needs coloring on 4 pages, whenever I'm unstuck from being Tyrian Tarot's little mail boy), it's just unfortunately not getting printed in the zine (I probably would have been able to finish it to a degree, but the quality would suffer a lot, which I didn't exactly want to do). 

When it comes to my GW2 favorites, nobody is dearer to my heart than Snarl Backdraft & Galina Edgecrusher. The two constantly bickering charr from Iron Legion/Vigil personal storyline were always my no. 1 pick whenever asked "Tell me what you like about Guild Wars 2".

The original story didn't have much of a plot (or, well, as much plot as one can cram at the limited space) besides showing a short scene of "what could have happened after the Pact airships crashed at the start of the Heart of Thorns storyline". Since we never had any official closure on these two sans the opening quote from agent Zildi, I wonder if they're still out there somewhere, being activelly forgotten by the overall narrative.

So there's some vinetooths (...teeth?), some Mordrem, some small bonding, and off we go.

However, seeing as I wasn't exactly happy with transition between pages 3 and 4, I'll be able to uncondense what was originally just crammed into narrative text and add one more scene that will hopefully fit the tone a bit better than "we don't have time for this, skip" that was the original script.

And yes, it was originally called "The Brush Tool.PSD", because it's what most of my placeholder names are and I suck at proper naming until pressed (and sometimes even after).

Full storyboard (without text) is added as a downloadable item.

Fun fact: "Pain response" is a Thief (Snarl's class) trait that says "Gain regeneration and remove damaging conditions when struck below the health threshold."