Hunger’s Bite Playlists

Making OC playlists is a time honored tradition, and because I had a few pages to fill up at the back of the book, I included my own playlists for the Hunger’s Bite cast. To quote myself: “The songs in these playlists were selected and ordered to tell the arc of each character—Neeta’s yearning for a life off the ship, Emery’s desperation to keep her there, Wick’s sense of duty and disillusionment, and Honeycutt’s growing appetite and ultimate defeat. Imagine them like a musical color key, and enjoy!”

You can find links to Youtube versions of the playlists by clicking their album art or titles.

Hunger’s Bite Alt Text

What is “alt text”?

Alt text is an old feature of pre-webtoon webcomics, where you could hover your mouse over a comic page, and see commentary by the author. Sometimes an extra little joke, sometimes a fun fact about the page, sometimes just whatever was on their mind when they uploaded it. Given my background is in webcomics, I thought it would be fun to continue the tradition even with a print book.
These were written with the assumption you’ve already read the book, so it’s best if you follow along on your second read. They will contain spoilers, some concept art, and some adult jokes. If there’s a page you want me to add, ask for it on my tumblr!

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pre-title: i was so committed to this idea of wick arriving as a bat that i did not remember for months that, like. he should be having a bad time because of the sun. making this introduction possible is 100% of the reason wick's sun weakness is reduced to 'a discomfort' rather than anything more dangerous. but also dracula and carmilla could walk around in the sun with only a minor reduction in strength, the sun killing vampires didn't become a thing until nosferatu which hadn't been made yet!

1: the amount of 3d models of the titanic i went through trying to find one that was both a) detailed enough for my needs but b) not so detailed it would crash CSP.......... awful. the RELIEF my computer must have felt after i was able to start deleting the model layer....

2: work smarter not harder

3: hardcastle is the only person from this page that i don't think i ever brought back in the later portion of the book. actually wait no he's in the boat the lightcliffes are trying to get on. either way sorry hardcastle you didn't get to be a character.

4: emery you can't put your fingers on your mouth and lick your lips like that

5: that panel with wick and sterling and the car is probably the most effort i put into inking a background (that wasn't an establishing shot of the ship). once i figured out the tech of just implying backgrounds during color instead of inking, i simply Stopped Inking Backgrounds.

6: his white boy swag

7: i think this is actually the first page in the book i inked and colored, so it got a little extra zhuzh as i was figuring out the workflow. probably my actual favorite of drawing of wick when you take out the funny ones cause he just looks so cool there

8: i remember when drawing these pages how perfectly i felt like i nailed honeycutt's hat. it always looked Right no matter the angle. do you know how hard hats are to draw.

9: show of hands how many of you had to look up what 'victuals' meant

10: apparently "chuffed" didn't come into common use until the 1950s. honeycutt existing outside of time confirmed??

11: emery i feel like this is on you for shaking his hand while it was apple sticky

12: honeycutt licking emery's apple sticky off his hand is the most perverse and evil thing he does in the entire book

22: fun fact, pleasance was originally conceived as wick's sister who worked for goldfinch with him. several drafts later that role was cut, but i still wanted a woman for the workers in the cast, thus i gave her a job on the ship. and a boyfriend who's obsessed with her, because wouldn't you be?

23: it was love at first sight for aamir. pleasance is a very independent yorkshire woman and needed some warm up time but she adores that goober now.

also she pegs him. obviously.

26: i wonder if "stand" and "take" are why that one review praised hunger's bite for its "robut onomatopoeia"

27: ah, we meet again. my great enemy. The Sun.

28: emery's story about unhooking the piano is a reference to the film "the legend of 1900", about a guy who was found as a baby on an ocean liner and simply never set foot on land. i remember liking it despite it being blindsidingly racist at times.

29: i had an entire clip file just for that staircase to get the angle right

30: this is what emery's GYUCK sounds like

33: their little kid selves are so cute :'| love neeta's giant bow and emery's little sailor suit

45: i owe my life to whoever uploaded that specific 3d model of a metal bed to the clip studio asset store

46: rip bozo

47: this whole spread was actually not in the very very first draft of the thumbnails. which is insane to me now, it establishes so much!!

48: and none of these guys were ever seen or heard from again

54: wick calling aamir jeeves is an ANACHRONISM!!!!!!!! the first jeeves story by pg wodehouse would not be published for another two years. i liked the line too much to cut it.

55: i self-described this as 'the page that will get my book banned' but tbh i am probably going to get away with it. until book 2 when i will get turbo banned. look forward to it.

56: i genuinely don't know what emery thought wick was doing to aamir. i think he just wanted an excuse to yell at him.

59: demonstrating wick's Special Vampire Technique of turning into a bat and a mist at the same time to pass through cracks. people do not use 'vampire can turn into mist' enough. i use it as much as possible.

60: i actually drew this page twice because i didn't like the treatment i gave it the first time. also God's Most Desolate Ocean Liner Cabin Because You Can't Make Me Draw All Those Knobs

61: emery's dad has had him in the bridge to do sailing lessons for most of his life. he probably could manage well enough for a few hours, if he had to.

77: GUILT! GUILT! GUILT! GUILT! i feel like i say this about every other page but this was ANOTHER visual i knew i wanted early on.

81: i hired an entire guy to make sure i got wick's accent right. there is nothing so cringe as an american writing english accents based on vibe.

82: these are my actual favorite drawings of wick in the whole book. also god you would not believe how hard i had to fight to keep this joke.

83: we are not going to explore the implications of books like dracula and carmilla existing in a world where vampires are actually factually real

85: half the reason neeta drops the book on him is because how Dare he imply there wasn't even a little bit of a chance they were making out

86: CHARGE! (except........ it's a cricket uniform. i realized so late in the process that emery, as a good british boy, would Not play baseball.)

90: i had such plans for making merch goldfinch pins but on reflection i don't think that's something anyone would want to wear

96: tara-a-bit is a specific black country slang. even when he's managed his accent, some things still slip through~

100: "i wonder if that isn't part of the problem" was originally a neeta line, but when i got to finishing this page, i decided that was a bit more self-aware than she ought to be about the situation.

101: it's not istanbul yet

102: i have put very little thought into what the rest of wick's anecdote would have been even though i reference it again in book 2. that's just the kind of author i am

103: damn i forgot to fill wick's umbrella handle with black on this page.

104: neeta skipping breakfast means she wouldn't have eaten for a full day and a half by the time they're rescued at the end. girl how did you do Any of that on an empty stomach.

114: honeycutt's whole speech is, i think, my actual Actual favorite part of the book. we love to write a villain speech. + the whole boiler lighting thing was really fun to make work

115: writing this and doing my best to not imply the existence of wick in emery's dialogue so honeycutt wouldn't know about him

116: i simply love the panel of neeta shoving wick out off frame

117: the "someone's neglecting her duties" line on this page is a lift from one of my own earliest experiences with old man misogyny, when i was 16 at a club party with my grandfather and one of his friends told me i had a duty as a girl to entertain the boys who were there. it upset me so much i had to leave.

119: that man absolutely climbed into the boiler.

121: emery would have been fucking Doomed as a modern teen with access to youtube. we have to accept this about him.

125: i picked up "sling your hook" from peaky blinders, which is set in birmingham. i'm not sure if it's something they also say in the black country and it would be really funny if i got that wrong on This page.

126: based on the way the "has he always been a--" "wick!" joke is set up you'd think he was going to say prick. but prick is said uncensored earlier in the book. he was actually going to say twat.

128: i actually don't have any good explanation for why the food was left out to rot, but it sure is evocative!

129: vampire lore of food tasting like ashes is too gross to imagine and wwdits vampire lore of it making them projectile vomit is too nasty to draw so i went with He Simply Can't Taste It.

131: i really wanted to avoid any sort of Categorizing Things Into Types Of Things with this world but 'illusory magic means there's a case!!' was pretty tough to get around

134: i guess they did eat fresh meat like him alive

135: the hand shaped cloud/smoke over the boat is another bit of imagery i Had to make sure got into the book. there was even a draft of the cover that had it on the back

140: this was one of the earliest visuals i knew i wanted in the book and i was SO worried i would have to cut it or tone it down when it got to the editors. i remember telling friends 'they better not make me cut my corpse room' and luckily they didn't! corpse room!

141: me internally justifying this whole spread: teens actually love it when books have a horrific body count

146: this page was a nightmare even using 3d models. but i comfort myself that nobody is going to look at it long enough to notice the one comparatively giant woman sitting on the right

147: i traced the violin players from a photo and i don't care who knows it. YOU freehand that.

148: it's a sign of how good i am at keeping the reader going along that the book has been out for a month and nobody has asked 'did she just not check in the first class dining area for the guy who works in the first class dining areas'

149: throwing myself upon my sword because i missed taking the arms off honeycutt's sunglasses in the first panel. that was an eleventh hour change i had to go back to every page and fix and i think i missed a few in this scene

152: *alarms go off* ALBUM TITLE!

153: emery saying "forever together" instead of "together forever" is something my english dialect editor tweaked and it makes my american brain scrunch but i trust him. i trust him.

155: i hate drawing food. i have always hated drawing food. i'd like to apologize to the indian food community for drawing vindaloo so poorly.

159: i really enjoyed working with the When Things Are Fucked Up brush in this scene because it's so loose and rough and gestural.

160: love my paneling on this page. i'm the best to ever do it

161: THAT TWINK STINK

162: finally. wick's hair is down. cute wick is here.

163: there's nothing actually wrong with pleasance she just refuses to engage with the story any longer

175: wtf how did nobody ask for this yet. anyway. you would not believe how many times i had to insist the carmilla joke would work. my editor was Convinced nobody would understand what wick was saying. buddy that she's a gay icon is the only thing ANYBODY knows about carmilla.

178: "nobody can get in without waking me" wick lied, lyingly.

180: this is another visual i had in mind from the very beginning. i really wanted this spread to hit you like a brick when you flipped to it.

181: that said, i regret covering him in the black soot. i think in the moment i worried it wasn't scary enough without it, but it definitely would have been.

182: >says nobody can get in without waking him up >sleeps through somebody coming in

183: is it his pocket knife? is it just the key viewed from top down perspective? you decide

184: you can also decide for yourself whether he was ever actually there (another reason i regret the soot, it makes it feel much less ambiguous)

188: i love to draw that man's teef. i was never consistent about whether they're flat scary or sharp scary and the fun thing about a freak like him is there's no reason it can't be both

190: i'm looking at the little symbol i drew next to honeycutt's face in the third panel and realizing i gave that man a loading cursor. did you know those are called throbbers.

193: these were very fun pages to thumbnail. and it was so nice to just not worry about background perspective because How Can You we're in weird warp world now

194: though i wish i'd done a better job making it obvious what order you're supposed to read these bubbles in! oh well. we persevere

195: a cowrie shell born from a swallow is from the tale of princess kaguya, and a golden harp is from jack and the beanstalk. also you can see the arabian pony she asks for on the next page. lol.

198: getting wick's pose right here was a NIGHTMARE and i'm still not convinced it properly conveys motion. but that's always been a struggle of mine with action poses.

199: neither of the WHAT's had punctuation originally but they made me add it >:[ it was funnier without 'em

200: i think you're being kind of dramatic emery :/

201: who else was terrified by the robot dog punching dents from the inside of the shave-o-matic in that one wallace and gromit

208: *points* sylas and fidelia

209: i definitely broke some 180/staging rules with these two pages lol

212: in my original thumbnails honeycutt wasn't going to be saying anything in the panel with him just smiling. it was going to be a beat, and then "but i'm a forgiving man" and i kind of wish i'd kept it like that.

oh but also this was one of the first and very few moments that i actually drew before starting the comic.

213: "lovesick little botfly" is, i think, 70% of the reason i gave emery the last name botwright. the other 30% is that it means boat maker.

214: weirdly salient to wick's arc, honeycutt, despite this being the first time you've ever interacted with him directly

215: AND IT'S NEETA WITH THE STEEL PIPE

217: i debated so much on what should be under the sunglasses. whether it should be nothing, or little red circles, or what. ultimately i decided on small red eyes in black holes. i think that's the scariest it could be while still keeping him expressive

219: kabedon

220: if this was a webcomic i probably would have stretched the "please don't leave me" panel to be way longer. in my mind it's this very long, drawn out moment.

221: *alarm* PLAYLIST TITLE!!

222: wick is so far away he had to have backhanded him to the moon

224: i had to rename the book at the eleventh hour and all the ideas were horrible and i was so fucking mad that i already had a comic named never satisfied because GOD IT WOULD HAVE FIT THIS BOOK A HELL OF A LOT BETTER

226: "of course this is the moment you choose to grow a spine, botwright" is maybe one of my favorite honeycutt lines, just for how hard he drops the chummy chummy act for emery. he never actually liked the kid.

227: you would not believe how hard it was to get those silhouettes to actually read the way i wanted to and to be the right scale.

228: a fall into water from that height would have killed her. good thing this is a cartoon

229: honeycutt putting his glasses back on is one of my favorite drawings of him.

230: a fall into water from that height would have ABSOLUTELY killed him. good thing this is a cartoon.

231: this page was so dark in proofs. like so dark my editor and i didn't even need to specify which one it was when we were talking about the pages that were too dark, we both just knew. it's still probably too dark.

232: i Really like the panel of wick gasping out of the water, but it does beg the question of whether he still needs to breathe.

233: a vampire can't freeze to death, but he can be frozen. not that this ever comes up.

234: emery's transformation back is--you guessed it--another of those visuals i had in my head from the beginning.

235: i really enjoyed drawing this 'everybody has wet hair' sequence. wick is very hot in the wet hair sequence.

236: "i ALSO heard you tell her you were GAY and a lot of this would have been AVOIDED if i KNEW THAT SOONER"

237: ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww compassion

238: not my sea circus not my sea monkies

248: narrator voice: he would live to regret that

251: there's nothing funnier i can say here than calling sterling a gay little twat. correct. [context: the person who asked for this alt text referred to sterling as a gay little twat]

253: goldfinch's office is based off tommy shelby's from peaky blinders

256: originally honeycutt was going to appear in the background like a specter but it was determined to be Too Much

257: i redrew goldfinch's side profile in the third panel so many times. it never looked right. he still doesn't look entirely right. old men that aren't cartoon triangles are so hard to draw...

258: *through a megaphone* IT'S A METAPHOR FOR THEIR RELATIONSHIP

259: i had to draw him using a knife with an apple so many times and i don't think i drew it correctly Once

262: them calling each other by their nicknames is how you really know they still care