Now the worst thing about moving away is having to say goodbye to those you call friends.
Sure it’s not a lost battle; as we moved to a new a city, we’ve met a wild bunch of new people. Some of these we will cherish overtime as our loyal friends, others will make nice acquaintances that we’ll call upon in a time of need, and the rest we will probably forget, like the countless others you meet in your day-to-day life. It will be exciting, it will be fun, but also bittersweet, for some friends you’d just want to drag along.
Vika Yermolyeva is one of those friends. She is an amazing artist and a musician with the sweetest of hearts, with a track record of impressive feat after another, and fan base so loyal – so large – that I can’t even comprehend.
We met Vika through her husband (also a close friend of ours with a heart made of candy), and while she first seemed shy, we came to know her over the years as wildly talented, funny, sarcastically witty, and a selfless person who just keeps blowing our brains away with one feat after another.
Vika is a Youtube-star, an award winning pianist, who plays rock and metal songs with a classical piano. She makes all the arrangements and sheet music herself, and her work is incredible, and if you’re lucky – you might even catch her gig somewhere.
I hope you like it, I hope you support her work, and I hope you have the greatest of Sundays.
Love,
Silver
Tweet tweet me all your Youtube-friends @runfreakrun and I promise to check them out.
The moving frenzy continues. From packing and sending to frantic house searching and familiarizing with everything strange.
But in order to lighten up the tone from last blogpost’s “moving sucks”-statement to something positive, we can give you a little peak of Berlin on our second Saturday afternoon here:
This is the street we live on. A slight shock after the pristine Frankfurt, but I prefer the liveliness here.
What is a post about Berlin, if it doesn’t contain graffiti of some kind?
This city has an endless amount of dogs, mostly running around without a leash, minding their business, while the owners are walking a hundred meters behind. The mutual trust between these dogs and the people is impressive.
Meet Peter. We’re lunching in a hipster cafe with him, while the conversation takes a plunge into goals, expectations and affirmations that the playlist playing on the background is indeed surprisingly awesome.
And lastly a sneak peak into our temporarily-teeny-tiny workspace and the pages that I’m working on..
And with that, I wish everybody a great week, and see you next Monday :)
Moving sucks. It sucks a big time, but there comes a time in everyone’s life that you just cannot avoid it any longer – and ‘hoy that time has happened to us! Silver and Kaija have now ended their four-year stay in Frankfurt, Germany and moved to Berlin to work on mobile and tablet games!
For five days and five nights we’ve packed, organized and packed some more until our entire life had been reduced to carton boxes and bubble wraps – until all that was left was the surreal feeling of owning so many things that I’ve totally forgotten about.
I hate moving, not because I’m not excited to see a new part of the world, but because I hate the hassle of packing away all my precious artifacts, for I am a creature of habit and comfort, and my house is my safe place, and it will take a while to get it all re-organized.
When it comes to packing away our precious’, I will especially miss our books. We have a lot of books from novels, to comics, to art books. We have so many books we could fill a small library and they are all delightful and special in their own ways. My only regret is that I can’t give them as much attention as I want to, and many of those books I’ve only read once.
And so, we are now in a state of anxiety and excitement as we’re starting new adventures and a search for a new apartment that will fill that hole that our previous apartment has left behind. Thank you Frankfurt for having us, you were extremely convenient, clean, and well maintained and I hope you never change.
For those of you concerned if this will affect the publication of Run Freak Run at all, let me assure you that we’ve prepared well and RFR will continue coming out page-by-page every Monday! So please keep on reading, and have a wonderful Monday! :)
A little over a week ago we got a question on the comments that we’d never thought of: what would Two’s theme song sound like?
It felt a little simple to just name one, so I thought I’d put together a small playlist of songs that I think fit the mood of Two and RFR in general. I’ll also try to explain a little why I chose a particular song, where I heard it first and how I feel about it.
So lets put on our hearing hats and listen on!
1. Goodnight Moon – Shivaree
When I first read this questions out loud, me and Kaija both immediately started thinking about Kill Bill soundtrack’s. Now, Tarantino’s a genius in my books, a definite inspiration, and I consider Beatrix from Kill Bill be the ultimate femme fatale. But she’s also a little sad, has anger issues, and solves way too many problems with violence – hence why this song fits perfectly with Two. Also the song has witches in it.
2. Black Angels – Bloodhounds On My Trail
I first heard about Black Angels about 7 years ago, and I’m still in love with their Passover-album. It’s just pure, raw, gritty energy that has a special place in my heart. I chose this song because it’s stubborn, narrow, never-give-up-once-you-made-your-mind attitude is something we feel Two can relate to.
Fun fact, this song was also on the first mix tape I gave to Kaija, during a time when Spotify and Ipods weren’t the mainstream listening devices that they are now. *old man mode*
3. Roky Erickson – Night of the Vampire
Continuing with the psychedelic rock, this chilling song from Roky Erickson is just the right amount of cool, funny, and magical. And I think that’s just perfect in describing the world Two lives in; with it’s roaming witches, wandering monsters, and sleeping gods.
4. Cowboy Bebop OST – Green Bird – Composed by Yoko Kanno
Now, I’m a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop the anime and the way it used music in it’s storytelling. This particular song, and the particular scene in question are burned in my minds eye so deeply that’s it hard to sleep at night. There will be a time in RFR when Two will fight again, and I hope you think of this song when it happens.
5. Andra – The Rain Don’t Talk To Me No More
Andra is fantastic. I wrote this the first time I heard her. Great song for coffee during the upcoming autumn days.
6. Lana Del Rey – Born To Die
Yes, I know Lana is like a hipster queen and vain or whatever, but so what since so are we (in my case, a king). She’s also unapologetic, and a go-getter and while those are also traits she shares with Two, I think she’s even more alike to the Queen. Everyone needs an enemy, eh?
7. Låpsley – Station
This was a recent find for us, and there’s something indescribable for me, a certain connection of melancholy that’s fitting for Two, no matter what she does – a right or a wrong thing – it’s always bittersweet. The kid really can’t catch a break, can she?
8. Ashtar Command – Deadman’s Gun
Or can she?
I guess you just have to read and see what happens.
Love,
Silver
Tweet, tweet usover Twitter, Facebook, or write in the comments, section to tell us what songs you’re reminded of when you read RFR. We’re super curious to hear about things like this :)
I glimpsed Kaija drawing tweety birds for this RFR chapter, and thought I’d take some photos and share them with everyone. Because Sundays just aren’t Sundays without some birds.
Yes, indeed – these are magical birds for the current Run Freak Run chapter, and if you are wondering why are there adorable magical birds being chased by monster-fish while what-you-might-call-it ethereal flying lady is flies past them? What kind of an adventure has Two got herself into this time? I can only tell you to be patient, and find out when the page is released, so nyeh-nyeh!
Fun fact: For the last six years Silver has acted as my personal hairdresser. The story that broke the camel’s back and led to this arrangement includes a really bad haircut and me walking out of the hairdressers fuming, with vengeance in my heart, and vigorously holding back tears. Since then I’ve had stress free hair cutting sessions resulting in bobs, pixie cuts, halfies and mohawks to name a few.
Silver’s done a fantastic job sculpting my hair (as he calls it) but for two of those six years his duties had been reduced to the monotony of shaving my head bald. Well, no more. I started growing my hair out, and Silver’s been tweaking it as it grows. He seems happy again.
Now, we both might have tendencies towards certain extremes, but I imagined growing long hair from a stubble would be a several year long trial of patience. Not that I minded that, but this plan did lack that touch of weirdness that I’ve been used to when it comes to my head.
However, dull plans sometimes get a sudden twist of inspiration. One day you might be sitting, minding your business while leisurely looking through a folder of reference pictures. You might see a photo you like, and say: “Let’s do this to my hair when it gets long enough.” and you might get an answer from the desk opposite of yours: “Let’s do it now”. And end up having half your head shaved within the next ten minutes. Again.
After several passionate requests we are now selling Run Freak Run – First 100 Facebook likes poster. We felt as if this one needed some extra special treatment for it being such a special moment in our history, and we decided to partner up with a printing house for some seriously excellent printing quality and for the largest size we could get.
The poster costs $29 and it is A1-sized (23.4 x 33.1 inch) , printed a heavy art paper, signed by the artist, and best of all – it ships free anywhere in the world!
The first year year of making Run Freak Run was riddled with confusion, self doubt and too often pushing yourself over the edge to a free fall into burnout. So, I’d rather just be happy about having gotten mostly over the biggest hurdles of this project and for having a good rhythm going for me, instead of looking back at a harder phase of production.
Nonetheless, I was jolted back in time, when Silver dug up a stack of RFR pages. The pages. In our minds these were the infamous pages. The bittersweet ones. The ones that were our false start.
The horizontal ones.
22 consecutive pages never saw the light of day.
Monsters were changed…
Some full page vistas were removed…
The pace of the story was quickened…
Some techniques were dropped due to their time consuming qualities.
Yes, we have 22 pages of RFR in horizontal format. I’ve always liked horizontal graphic novels and it felt like a better format to publish on the internet. We never got to try out that theory though, because we restarted the comic in vertical format after the first chapter was done.
We had given ourselves a year of preparation before we’d launch the webcomic. Out of those 12 months, only 6 were left at that point and we were in square one again.
Funnily enough I don’t remember switching to a regular format being a hard decision. We had reasons that fundamentally outweighed the “cool” factor of the horizontal pages. More affordable printing costs in the future being one of them.
The positive note in these kinds of situations is the knowledge you accumulate on the first try. Restarting something you’ve worked hard on will be demoralizing, but redoing the work will go faster than on the first try and dare I say, even better if you hunker down and just do it.
Silver got to rewrite some of the story, I got to streamline the techniques I wanted to use for drawing the pages. All in all it gave the comic a slightly better start and made our future production easier.
There’s no big morale to this story. As you already know, everything has ended well. Sometimes false starts just happen. And I guess you just have to know when to kill your darlings and restart.
Ever wanted your very own Inquisitor at home? Well now is your chance!
We are selling the original art page for Chapter 7, Page 21,
you know – the one where Six has killed all the Mer-men.
As always, this was hand-drawn by Kaija with the highest quality of
Sumi-e inks on an extra smooth bristol paper.
And there is only one. Free shipping and free frame included!
