I've played a lot of Halo, studied their art direction, and done the equivalent with the comics medium. So when I see the two combined, all my brain does is see what the artist is doing, not what he's actually depicting. That's not saying it's bad, that's me saying I can't stop dissecting. It's me being an anal ass. I just see the lines and shapes, the reference images and the successes and mistakes, the rushed panels and the panels that were enjoyed. I can't see the whole.

Have you ever watched a behind-the-scenes documentary and then lost some of the magic of the actual movie? It's sort of like that. I flipped through the comic and read the Jun pages in my store today, but all I saw were the screenshots and action figures that the artist used for reference (which is something I did, too), and other stuff like that.

I enjoyed the Dark Horse's Mass Effect comics I've tried much more because I've taken a much more casual approach to that universe. But Halo, a comic, AND Jun... I'm too close to those things, hah! All I see is a guy walking into the scene with a weird tattoo on his head, not Jun, especially not the Jun I ran off on an affair with in my head for a year. There's some other reasons too, that makes Halo comics hard for me to enjoy, like failures of things I've tried to get published, but I'm trying to fight that childish bitterness, exchange it for optimism towards future endeavors. Just gets harder every year. Feel like I'm running out of time to find success in art.