It may be hard to see it but this is the most difficult page I’ve drawn for Variables… by a long shot, actually. In it, we have a wide shot of Athens and a crowd gathering at the Polytechnic University. The Athens cityscape was obnoxious and once it has been finished, you can’t even tell why. Because of the mish-mash of streets that is Athens without the aid of modern city planning agencies, nothing is on a grid. It goes in every direction. It seems as if you can’t find a street that goes in one direction for more than two blocks in that city. So I drew the buildings that way. I used five or six different perspective angles so that, unlike most other cities, the buildings wouldn’t line up in prettily in the background.

And you can hardly freakin’ tell.

Anyway, despite my hand cramping so badly that I could barely finish the last panel, I’m really happy with the page. It may be the nicest page of Variables yet (most definitely if you’re only paying attention to technical details) and the difficulty I had with the layout paid off in the end. Yay! But after this, I’m going to lay off obnoxious background-heavy layouts in consecutive pages since I started this issue off just that way.

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