kath-ballantyne:

Ruth and I signed up for Marvel Big Bang and decided to write and art a story about Bruce. I have many, many Bruce feelings. Do read the fic. I’d love to talk about it.

Story: These Walls Are Paper Thin by iamshadow21 at AO3. No pairing and G rated.

Story summary: When most people think of Bruce Banner and The Hulk, they think of it as an either/or situation and assume that it’s easy to tell who they’re face to face with.

Most people are wrong.

Ruth’s notes: Beta by the amazing and ever-supportive tree00faery.
Fanart by my partner, kath_ballantyne, who was as eager to read this story as I was to write it, and who made so many wonderful works for it from the day I started writing up until yesterday. This is as much her labour of love as mine, so please, if you like the art, click through on a picture or click through to part two of the series to leave her kudos or comments.

I wrote this back in June, and I am SO EXCITED to be able to publish it. Five months is a really long time to wait.

This was in no small way influenced by watching Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and seeing how the creators showed the dynamic between Bruce and the Hulk. It’s made clear that it’s not just angry green Bruce – the Hulk is a character in his own right, to the point where they occasionally have conversations. It made me think a lot about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and about Bruce and the Hulk’s journey in it, from The Incredible Hulk through to The Avengers (and his post-credits cameo in IM3), and this story was born.

(Emma’s Note on Ruth’s notes)*[from what I can remember Ruth and I were talking about this idea before we watched Earth’s Mightiest Heros and flailed at seeing Hulk and Bruce portrayed that way. I could be wrong. We talked about this idea and a few others but I’m really glad we went this way. We liked the idea that Hulk was there from long before the Gamma incident. I know trauma split multiples are rather an over done trope and media doesn’t usually handle them very well. I think Ruth did better than that but given the source material is pretty much Jeckl there’s only so much you can do. I struggled a bit trying to come up with a unique way to show this all in art and ended up just using shadows. Not exactly unique but hopefully it gets the idea across. Ruth wrote about the Multiplicity stuff here]*

Art Notes: This was the first time I’ve participated in a Big Bang where I was part of the process from the beginning. Some of these artworks were drawn before anything was written and some were drawn later to illustrate written scenes. It was really interesting to play a part in creating the story as well as just drawing from a fic. I really enjoyed it.

IamShadow21, as always, did a wonderful job of finding the words for this
idea we came up with. Thank you my love. I loved working with you. Your words always make me feel.

I’m really excited to get to share this with people finally. The story has been basically finished for 4 months and we’ve been sitting on it, unable to talk to others about it.

Over on AO3 I’ve put in alt text on these for those using screen readers or who have pictures turned off. I think it works though the hover text is just the title rather than the description.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/2483831

All G rated