This being the first ring entrance of the comic, there were some logistics to it that I didn’t really think about and had to figure out while I was drawing it. I didn’t want a big, complex WWE or TNA style entrance stage for the prison league, but I still wanted to make it look science-fictiony, so I set the ring in a transparent cube attached to the side of the prison. That way I could keep the ring set-up and entrance stage very simple, but you could see the surface of the asteroid that the prison sits on in the background, as well as space. I changed how I rendered space in the background a few times over the course of the first match, trying to figure out what worked the best. I started off with cross-hatching, then tried blacking it out but with little things like the glass streaks and other asteroids in the background to identify it as space, as opposed to the crowd, which is also frequently blacked out.
The actual entrance was fun to draw, but took forever because I wanted to establish the crowd of inmates. It’s one of those things that ends up being worth it, but that causes me to question my sanity while I’m doing it.
Hugh Jameson and John Bradley, the commentary team for PPW, are also introduced here. Their commentary is identified by the little microphone icons with a letter attached to a caption box, like John’s line in the last panel. It’s kind of self-explanatory, but I wanted to point it out to make sure it made sense to people, because it’ll be showing up quite a bit over the course the comic.
Hugh reminds me of Kent Brockman.
It wasn’t on purpose, but you’re totally right. I think it’s the hair that does it.