Usurper 3 Prophecy - comic with special guest!

"The sun shall fall and scatter... into Ultimate Darkness..."

Well it's been a very longtime coming but it is here at last. Usurper 3 continues the story of the birth of Ultimate Darkness and cranks it into 5th gear! With some debuts, an apocalyptic prophecy, violence on 3 time lines and some of the most vile acts featured so far this really is an issue to not miss!

Download at www.udsg.co.uk once downloaded can be extracted using anything to handle ZIP files. If you can't extract them once downloaded you can use a utility such as IZArc which is freely downloadable.

This issue we see more following on from the events of the prior 2 issues and a massive shock after the action in the finale of... ah that'd be telling! Also mucho thankies to Fatal Nova for the screens provided. And many thanks to Usurper's forumite special guest (I won't say who or it'd be spoilerific) for their assistance in reshooting along with the help, patience and support of the whole of UD.

Feedback, comments, cheers and jeers are always welcome!

A whole lotta love gone into the creation of those comics, very well done Starscreamer.

Brilliant! That kind of effort needs to be off the screen and on the paper – nice glossy paper. My highlights were:

- Page seven just rocks. I had this big grin on my face when I flipped to that page.

- And then I got to page eleven and the cat had to get off my knee while laughed in surprise. Beer nearly went all over my nice desk.

- Page sixteen looked cool as well. Love the text and styling.

Overall another excellent addition to the sequence. As I’ve said before, I still have no idea how you do this and it does look great. I like the story progression as well. There are little tweaks I’d do with the text, but it’s barely worth it given the quality of the production as they are only little things.

One suggestion, is there any way you can make this more accessible? I’ve never looked in to online comic publishing and I suspect you’d have to change the size of the pages, but this work does deserve to be seen by more people and I’m just thinking that a download isn’t the best way to let people see it.

Let me know if any of that isn’t clear.

Thanks for the kind words mate, but I can't imagine what made turning to page 11 so funny..... Although "paragon's little ones" may find it more impressive than when Aurora Borealis took stage in the Darkbow series. And oh yeah ya didn't think that the events with Black Scorpion from that series were finished did you? Should know by now it all intersects and goes crazy all over the place.

A personal fave of mine though was page 20, but that just had to happen alas. Besides it has far bigger ramifications...

I will actually let you in on some secrets here. About 60% of the shots used since the very first solo story "Sea of Stars" were not scripted - they just came from mishes and TFs - in that ones case the Sky Pirate TF. However, certain additional shots since have been more scripted to allow certain scenes to have the very specific expressive shots combined with this games great flowing combat shots.

None of this would be possible without the wonderful assistance and support of my SG Ultimate Darkness as they continually help me get shots I need and put up with my pushy direction. I've also always given everyone with a char featured a say in how they want them portrayed. Naturally I still have creative license but I like people to see a bit of how they imagine their char within this comic. A lot of the dialogue is largely based on daft convo while teaming. In particular note the mental rubbish The Wreckers come out with errr constantly lol

The lettering customisations themselves were actually something I did because of a random comment about the first comic. Someone said she didn't read comics because she found it hard to tell who was talking so that got me thinking. Ingame you can change ya chat colours so why not in my own comic? So thats where that spawned from. I then try to make it similar to that chars colours, chat colours, powers, personality etc. Plus I'm actually an IT tech so have a vast amount of fonts at my disposal. All of this is done using a wonderful little comic app I got for free with my laptop that I then upgraded to the Pro version (and am going to side-grade soon to the even newer one).

And now that rants over I'll refer to ya download comments. When I started I was originally doing them as PDFs but what I had at the time made the file size too huge and the quality lower than I wanted. I then started distributing in a number of ways but my file hosting isn't huge. The problem is I actually publish them as a high quality comic. I could put less on each page, cut down the dialogue and make it larger and render lower, but I actually hated how that looked when testing. Sadly I'm a perfectionist and think the quote "Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned" is highly apt (think Picasso said it can't remember). But, then after upgrading the software it gave the rendering options in PNGs an awful lot better and pushed file size right down so was a balance of quality vs size. I've recently relooked into redistributing in other formats but alas as it stands this is the single best way to prevent the text being made less readable as PNGs make it the crisp lettering it should be.

Naturally if anyone can think of a better idea and apps to use (Windows XP or Mac OSX it don't matter which) I'm open to explore and test them.

Again thanks for the feedback mate any and all always appreciated and if ya like it as much as ya have said now and previously feel free to make anyone ya know that may like it to look.