File 5 Post-Release Thoughts

Posted 09/29/25

File 5 - Kinder than Man was released more than a week ago and is now the most viewed COOPER BULLET File on Newgrounds, with 1.6k views and counting. I think this is also the first comic to get a front page banner on the site as well?
Either way, I can't thank everyone enough for all the support the comic's gotten, and I'd like to make my fifth newspost on this thing (see the four others here) talk about why and how it took so long from December 2024's File 4 - Robbery Gunchild.

Short answer: scared.

Long answer: I had long wanted to tell an emotionally heavy COOPER BULLET story from the very start, since the project's inception in 2021 as SHOOT, DON'T TALK. Though my writing has very much improved since (read a sample of my 16 y/o writing here), I've always felt I was still incapable of delivering such a story as effectively as possible. Maybe because I felt I was still too immature to handle it?

INSPIRATION

I hate my wife. You go on stage in a room full of boomers, say that in the microphone, and every old stinking fart in there would laugh. But what if there was one old guy amongst the rest of the wretched fucks who was just sitting there confused? What if he looked around and just thought out loud "Really? But I love my wife! I think she's the best person in the world!"

That was what sparked the idea for this File. Yes, it's based off that one Extra Fabulous Comic. I just thought well what if someone hated that there was this one old guy who didn't hate his wife, so much that he pays someone to kill him?
You'd think this is a pretty ridiculous reason for one to want to kill someone, but unfortunately irl some people have been killed for more ridiculous reasons.

Peter Hartnell's design was a first draft that never got past being a first draft. The idea was to have a scary looking old man who also had a softer side, so the first thought was the First Doctor, played by William Hartnell. I also needed a scary face, which another actor also had, that being Peter Cushing. So Peter Hartnell ended up being Peter Cushing in a First Doctor wig.

It was not in my mind at all that Peter Cushing himself had actually played some non-canonical version of the First Doctor for a movie adaptation of that Doctor's Dalek serial. That was interesting.

PRODUCTION WOES

File 3 - Plan No Plan took nine months to do, beginning after the release of 1. That one was plagued with serious workflow issues, being the first longform >30 page story. I had a transcript but no proper thumbnails, no proper direction, funnily enough I planned no plan for Plan No Plan.

Similarly, File 5 also took nine months. With that, I'd like to bring you a list of things I had done in between File 4 and 5's release dates:

What the hell took so long? This sort of thing takes only a couple of months to do, so why did it take me nine months?
I don't know, but I know for a fact that the comic wouldn't nearly be as good if I had finished this some months earlier.

I had trouble regarding how to start it. I had trouble regarding how to end it. I had trouble regarding how to fill in the middle. I only had a basic outline, but didn't really work out the specifics until I got to the pages that needed to be done. In fact, the script you see above? It underwent two rewrites, and that's just for the beginning alone.

I really only had one goal.

DON'T F--- IT UP

I think i might've spent a lot of time rereading the script and rereading the layouts and rereading the pages just to make sure I was pacing it correctly. That I was setting the right emotions correctly. That I didn't add anything that was non-crucial or left out any that were crucial. I was constantly going back and forth between what do I want versus what do I need, and sure, everyone does this for anything they make, but this time I was even more hell-bent on not screwing things up.

Even until now I feel I could've executed parts of the File better than I currently did, but I don't know. I'm just glad what I eventually did manage to do was good enough.

PRODUCTION WHOAS

Previously I used JustSketchMe and very occasionally Source Filmmaker for poses. One is a dumb limited piece of shit web app that made you pay to put a f---ing gun in or literally anything else in the 3D workspace, and the other is Source Filmmaker, which is its own set of problems. So I decided to use a combination of Blender and.... Hammer++.

Hammer++ is a map editor for Source games. More specifically it's a mod of Valve's Hammer Editor that generally makes it leagues better to use (the original is straight up unusable for folks like you and me). This is why I mentioned my 5Dustbowl map earlier, because recently I had been using it to mod TF2 maps and occasionally make my stupid ideas, but I had also been using it for backgrounds, using Hammer++ for Counter-Strike: Source and later Left 4 Dead 2.

Some pages had already been finished by the time I started using Hammer++ for File 5, but apart from a few select backgrounds, pretty much most of the backgrounds in the comic used environments made in Hammer++ as a base.
Maybe soon I'll make a tutorial on how to make backgrounds in Hammer++ for your art.

Ideally, you use Hammer++ to make the background reference, then maybe convert it for use in Blender to pose some posedolls with the environment. But I never really did this, out of laziness; I didn't know how and I didn't want to know how. So when I used my custom Jenny posedoll for something, and it required a background, I just made the background in Blender to go with it, using simple shapes.

This Jenny posedoll is absolutely garbage when you look at it from a modeller's perspective, but I don't mind. It does the job well, and drawing over it looks like I hadn't used a 3D model to begin with.
JustSketchMe was easy to use and also very convenient, but apart from the inability to use any other models apart from their basic male and female models, said models also suck. Proportion-wise they're really exaggerated and don't fit the proportions of my characters; the female posedoll has really wide hips which I didn't want to give Jenny, among other things, so a custom posedoll was necessitated.

RESTRAINT

The page where these panels come from is the only page with a standard 2x3 layout.

Why does this matter? Because usually the thing I try to do with COOPER BULLET layouts is to make each page's layout unique. Occasionally I will reuse layouts, yes, but either way they're still different, and I made it a rule to never use this 2x3 layout ever in a File.

So why did I break that rule here? Because restraints. A better word might be discipline. It would've been very easy for me to try and go wild with the layouts like with most other pages. And while I was at it, maybe I could've added in wacky panel backgrounds, too. I could've done a lot of things.
But it did not feel right, at the slightest, to try and go wild. The above panels belonged in a page that came from a very emotionally heavy part of the story, and it was this part's pathos that I felt was vitally important not to screw up. If I had done what I said I could've, then I risked losing the feelings by placing the focus on the wacky, coolio creative layouts and expressive backgrounds, instead of what those layouts and backgrounds were supposed to emphasize. So I had no choice but to play it straight.

The moral lesson here is that sometimes the most effective option is the most boring option.

FILE TOO FAT

File 5, together with its cover, the opening credits page, and the little outro page, all-in-all make 42 image files (39 pages), the longest File in CB history as of yet. The previous record holder was File 4 with its 39 image files (36 pages).

The image limit for Supporters is 40 image files.

Before I finished the comic, I had contacted Tom asking if he could increase the limit for Supporters to 50 image files and later 45, keeping in mind NG bumping the filesize limit for .swfs just for SMBZ 8 more than a decade ago. Removing pages was not an option for me, because I could not see a single page I could remove without the whole story suffering as a result. I didn't also just want to remove the extra pages, even if they were admittedly superficial. So I asked Tom and waited maybe a few days, since he usually replied within one or two.
Then a friend later suggested combining multiple pages into one, which I found worked extremely satisfactorily, so that solved the problem of not having enough image files. Everybody say thank you @Danimpish!

The one takeaway I had with this situation was to not go too overboard with multiple full-page spreads. Not because they were hard to do (they were my most favorite to do) but because I tended to do too much. But I can't help it. They were cinematic. Anyone who, like me, made comics like they were storyboarding a scene would not help themselves either.

FIN

I don't know what else to say. I'm just glad everyone enjoyed File 5.
Before I finished the comic, I had showed my friends all the finished pages (there were only two pages left at this point), and they all came back to me telling me how much it resonated with them, particularly the parts nearing the end.

To be honest with you, I wasn't expecting the comic to be this earnest. I mean, make no mistake, I knew what type of story it was going to be. But I just wasn't expecting the comic to be the way it was. It might be my best work. My fears then was that I wouldn't be able to handle such a serious story; my fears now is that anything I write will never live up to this one.

I will end this newspost by sharing this one bit of trivia.

A handful of pictures of Peter Hartnell and his wife Sylvie are actually based on pictures of my maternal grandparents, who had gone on a trip to the United Kingdom back in the early 2000's to visit my aunt, who migrated there years prior.

Around the time I was finishing File 3 back in August of last year, my grandma suddenly passed away. For her wake, I was assigned to make a video presentation showcasing pictures of her, and that same aunt provided me with a whole folder of them. One half was full of pictures from the previous year, the other half full of those old travel pictures, all of which I had saved in my computer to make the presentation.

Not once at the time did I ever think to dedicate anything to my grandma, not even File 3, but for File 5 I thought I'd try and keep her memory alive (and make up for the lack of a dedication) by somewhat inserting her into something I've made. No, she doesn't look like Sylvie IRL.
It was something else seeing her face again. She was younger and happy and everything, along with my grandpa who also looked similarly happy. Now, my grandpa is still alive, albeit he suffered a third stroke some years ago and now couldn't speak or really function very well, and he remains my only living grandparent.
Admittedly my grandparents didn't really have a great relationship, but I still oftentimes wonder if he misses her.

I know I do.

In some other news, COOPER BULLET 2022 got Half-Life 2'd! By that, I mean, all the previously separately uploaded parts are now in a single Art Portal submission for easier reading. Don't know why you'd want to read that, however.