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NickonAquaMagna

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Everything posted by NickonAquaMagna

  1. Well.... they made it to the Kini. A lot was covered in these pages! Feedback is appreciated.
  2. Well.... if there are any fans left, it's gonna take a while to "re-activate" them.
  3. Look who else is back! It's Toa Mieli. Just compare to how she looked in 2014. The new design really screams "PSIONIC POWER" to me.
  4. And now, finally... SOME NEW PAGES. Here we get our first look at a "river Tarakava." The turquoise toy was always stumpier than the blue one, so I like to imagine that's a sleeker ocean variety built to swim greater distances and depths. The Toa resumes! And we're riding this one 'til it's over.
  5. Thank you. Uploading some new pages tonight. But first... Some older pages that needed to be revised. The original uploads of these pages were just... insufferable to read after a while. I managed to trim the text down by about a 3rd, making it much more concise and less repetitive. Just goes to show what a difference a couple of years can make. Recommended that you enlarge these pages. Sorry the resolution isn't that great, but hey, that's BZP for ya. Gotta keep those file sizes below 750 kbs. If you want the proper resolution, I recommend going to my DA gallery. https://www.deviantart.com/nickonplanetripple/gallery/64101494/the-toa-a-bionicle-retelling
  6. Hey, everyone. I've been hard at work on this story (off and on) anyway and have finished, well... a good number of new pages that I've simply neglected to upload here. I'll start posting more soon, as I have more time for it.
  7. Everyone.... I need a moment of your time. Years ago, in the interim between Bionicle Generations 1 and 2, when there was no G2 on the horizon, I and other fans kept Bionicle alive in our own ways. Mine was by picking up the original story thousands of years later, with a new generation of Matoran that had settled on another planet. Most of the characters were new faces, and the familiar few that did return were cast in a new light. The structure was pretty simple, at first. For every six months, I'd whip up a "short" story with a "wave" of characters associated with it, trying to recreate the feeling of keeping up with the magazines in the 2000s and such. Typically three Matoran characters and a wave of Toa or villains. The nostalgia factor of this came not from the scant returning elements, but that feeling of walking into an alien new world. I tried to recapture the magic of 2001 by building a great big sandbox and.... dumping viewers into it. The format was a hybrid of the comics and online serials, mostly text with an illustration here or there. And for a time? It was good. It was fun, it was special. But sometimes later on, I..... fell out of it. I shifted focus to things like Planet Ripple, and worked on other projects between volumes. I just didn't have time for this. The whole idea of the format was I'd be able to tell more of the story in less space and time than, say, a comic, but even that eventually proved inefficient and I started making the illustrations and text separate to save time. Even that didn't help much, and I eventually gave up just as it was getting good. And I kept telling myself I'd jump back into it eventually, but every few months I look back and attempt re-entry... and I burn up. I'm just gonna say it. I don't like Nova Orbis anymore. Not as it was. I've changed a lot as a writer and an artist in the last several years, and there is so much I see here that just doesn't hold up. The writing, especially. The dialog is plodding and probably SOUNDED profound to me at the time, but that just means I liked to hear my characters talk. It's downright navel-gazy. The whole IDEA of going with this format was to condense a sprawling story to be digestible, but in no time at all it became as lore-heavy as the worst parts of G1. It's a monster of walls of text and bloated conversations that don't really.... SAY much. Like there's nuggets of gold in there, but they have to be dug out. Streamlined, simplified. And to top it all, the text is all but unreadable with DeviantArt's new, darker facelift, and more websites are going that way. Here are some things I would change if I took a crack at Nova Orbis nowadays. Make a better island. Miro Nui's just kind of ugly to me now. I could clean it up a good deal. Put a body of water inside the island like America's great lakes and have the Ga, Ce and Vo-Matoran live there, instead of away from the island. Merge the tribes. I had thirteen Matoran tribes on this island, and grouped them together into about five "wahis." I'd lean into this aspect more, blending some of the tribes together into fewer "tribes" since they don't look all that different anyways, and I want to show these diverse people becoming more interwoven and getting along. Fewer scenes where the Turaga are obtuse and vague just for artificial tension. This is by far the MOST ANNOYING part of reading Nova Orbis to me, now. To keep the story going and create a mystery, I basically made the Turaga Knuckles' stupid dad Locke from the Archie Sonic comics and his brotherhood of detached grandpas. I'd also include more scenes where the Toa grow frustrated with the Turaga and confront them. MAKE CALOR INTERESTING. My word, what a wet blanket of a character. I tried to make him a subversion of the Toa of Fire shtick, less hot-tempered and headstrong, but..... he just came off like a really dull guy. You can make a "soft" fire character, like Vakama in 2004. You can make Toa of Fire who can't deal with the pressure of leading their own Toa teams, but the way I did it was tepid. These days, I'd make Calor... a mood. He'd be more cynical, not overbearingly, just.... disillusioned. Maybe he could even relate to Ahkmou, that'd be something. And, probably the most paradoxical change of all.... I might have to make it a comic. I know that sounds crazy, like "How would you find the time to adapt ALL THAT TEXT into comic form?" Simple. I wouldn't. If I were to attempt such a thing, I'd cut out a lot of lines and descriptions that just don't need to be there. Simplify the dialog, make each line impactful and poignant, and let the scenery and expressions speak for themselves. They'd ideally be fairly short comics, "issues" like the official ones. This isn't how I normally do things these days, but I tried something similar with my old Star Fox comics and it was a good exercise in restraint if nothing else. The point is, Nova Orbis is a bloated beast that I just don't think can be saved. If I ever DO reattempt it, say... in 2021, Bionicle's 20th anniversary, I'd rebuild it from the ground up. If I ever caught up to where the original story left off and picked up from there, it'd continue more or less the same, but in a more digestible format, which was really the point of Nova Orbis all along. A fresh start. Now, I understand the concern some may bring up here, that I'll just end up unsatisfied with my older work every few years and keep restarting it over and over, never finishing it, but I don't see that happening. I don't find myself redoing all of my older works. There's just something about Nova Orbis in particular that's.... less compatible by the day. It really doesn't hold up. But if I can salvage what's good about it, then I'd like to try. Maybe when "The Toa" is finished. Maybe I've been going about this all wrong from the beginning. We'll see. A widget for your thoughts?
  8. Hmmmm.... a mask of mutation sounds like it would be ideal for Mutran. And that mask of Avarice is AMAZING. Perfect for some giant titan. I'm currently working on revamps of the 2008 Toa and Makuta, and one of the big challenges is the Mistika. With Tahu, I'm wondering if it'd be better to use his 08 mask or this shapeways one. I'm also wondering if it'd be better to dye the dark red pieces bright red, or dye the custom mask dark red.
  9. Anyone got pictures of a mask they ordered being worn by a figure?
  10. I'll get back to it soon. Right now, I basically just need one line for the Planet Ripple trailer, and then it's done. After that I've gotta finish a few commissions and I'll get back to updating this pretty regularly. One page a day... no way, then it would take years and years to finish this comic. I'm going to wrap it up within one year if I can help it.
  11. Thanks. Sorry to say, this month is gonna be kinda crazy. I've begun work on the Planet Ripple trailer, but it's a collaborative effort so I'm still working things out with other people. I can only hope I'll have finished editing it in a week or so. Once that's out of the way and I've prepared everything I need for the convention, I'll get back to this. Wish me luck. And yeah, I know it feels a lot like MNOG right now.... but this story's gonna go some crazy places before it's over. I'm going to keep it as coherent as I can, but if there was only one year for finish Bionicle's story, well it's going to end up being very different and have a different message at the end. No 7th tribe, sorry to say. I only just found out about that unused concept yesterday. But the Matoran are being taken... somewhere. You'll find out later.
  12. Oh yeah. I'm just saying I thought it'd be neat if they were ejected on the way down before Mata Nui landed, as if to make it harder for Makuta to intercept the canisters somehow.
  13. Yeah.... ever since I saw that shot from the cancelled PC game of the cans falling from the sky, that image stuck with me and I was SO DISAPPOINTED when Dume and the other Turaga revealed that no, they'd been floating in the ocean for all that time. Given the later revelation that Mata Nui's robot body crash-landed on the planet, that he himself literally fell from space, I was even more dumbfounded by this retcon. It seems perfectly plausible to me that the Toa cans could've been EJECTED from the robot as he was falling and remained floating up there until the Turaga realized their heroes were taking too long to show up and appointed Takua to summon them. ....and I think I just gave away another thing I've changed about this story (their pods being ejected while Mata Nui was still in space, I mean). Oh well. There's something weird about Ga-Matoran and Toa of water being uniformly female. It pushes the stereotype of women being wiser and fairer than men and puts an undue burden on any given team's Toa of water to be the voice of reason when the male members fight or whatever. Makes you wonder how many Toa teams may've been dysfunctional to the point of disbanding if they didn't have the "girl ninja" tempering them. Changing that just seemed like a good idea.
  14. Well, I guess that settles it. There's no way we're getting another movie based on lego's own IPs. It's just parodies of licensed stuff from here on out... sigh.
  15. Sorry to say this is it for now. I need a break, so I'm taking the week off. Hopefully the comic will resume this next saturday. What's everyone's impression of this so far? As far as the "first issue" and the first few pages of the next one go?
  16. I love how much the sky adds to these scenes. So glad I took those pictures when I did. Even if the quality isn't great, gumming them up to look appropriately cartoony for this isn't too hard. Enough with the exposition dumping, time to see some Rahi fighting in the present! Is what I'm sure some are thinking after these five pages of non-stop talking... don't worry, we're not far off from that.
  17. Tried doing a few things differently with this page. It was cathartic after those last coupla' pages drained me.
  18. You might enjoy this, then. A debate about what the three virtues actually mean. Yes, this is happening. Remember, if these pages are too small to read you can enlarge them on DA. https://nickinamerica.deviantart.com/gallery/64101494/The-Toa-A-Bionicle-retelling
  19. Oooohh, then you're gonna love him in today's uploads. Also... Dangit, I really wanna call him Jala but I don't wanna get hacked by a troll or something claiming to be a maori representative... which is basically how things went the first time. Guess I'll go with the name changes just to be safe. Sigh.
  20. Question... is it okay for a non-profit fan tribute to call him "Jala?"
  21. This is... probably pretty plain for a cover. I wanted something minimalist and clean, but I might whip up a "proper" cover and rework this as a back cover sometime. I was a little cautious about putting my name at the bottom since it sounds like I'm claiming these things are mine. No I am not, this is a simple non profit fan comic. A tribute to something that hugely influenced my sensibilities growing up and inspired me to become the writer I am today. I owe a lot to this silly toy line. Will upload page 19 tomorrow. Not sure what kind of "theme" music a project like this should have. While I love most of the music in the old Bionicle movies, the "epic" orchestral themes just doesn't seem as fitting for something like Bionicle to me as they would for more traditional fantasy like LoTR. Sure, the more somber tracks fit well in the 2nd and 3rd movies, which are all about a fantastical culture dying overnight, but for those early days on the island... Maybe something more like the music you'd hear in a Metroid game? Come on, just listen to this or "Tallon Overworld 2" and tell me that doesn't sound like living, singing machines in a wild natural setting with temples an' stuff.
  22. Minor spoiler- It won't be Lewa this time.
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