Soapbox!
1 month down!
January 29th, 2010
So I made it 4 weeks in a row without missing an update. That sounds pretty pathetic, but given my prior track record I’m pretty damned happy about it.
I forgot how much I really enjoyed doing this. Doing it in color is much more difficult, and I’m staying up until 1am most every night struggling to get the next update online in time for each update day, but I’m really enjoying myself. I’d stopped doing it for so long, and had been working on graphic design so much that I started to wonder whether or not I was really that into the comic idea anymore. I wondered if the only reason I wasn’t planning to do the comic again was so that I’d have an excuse to design and build this new website.
But man, now that I’m doing it again? I’m having so much fun. I’m incredibly happy that I evolved the character’s looks as well. Each character has his own unique facial / body structures, and I dig the challenge of figuring out how to draw each one in the various angles / poses. Plus, I haven’t once had the urge to copy / paste a panel yet. I think that’s largely due to having to draw a different character each panel, rather than drawing the same character over and over, with different hair / glasses.
I’d eventually like to get to the point where I can start drawing them in different outfits. It’s probably just the artist in me, but I really like that about Girls with Slingshots. That each character changes clothes on a regular basis, never wearing the same outfit too often, and you still instantly recognize who the character is. There’s a lot to be said for having a recognizeable wardrobe as well, however, so I’ll work towards a middle-ground.
I made a mistake on today’s update with one of the word balloons. It didn’t really ruin the comic, I don’t think, but it was noticeably wrong. Glad to have that fixed, finally. It was seriously bugging me all day.
True story
January 20th, 2010
I wrote this story arc over three years ago when I began the sprinkles gags. Each part was scripted out. Karen tricks Jacob into eating sprinkles, and the cat explodes as a result.
Last month, after I started drawing the strips again, picking up the story where it had left off, my parents’ cat died in an similar fashion (probably unrelated to sprinkles though). I’m not clear on the details, but it was apparently a tumor or something. That exploded.
So, should my family be reading this… I was not ‘inspired’ by Ozzie’s passing. The timing is just a really really bad coincidence.
Priorities
January 18th, 2010
Have you ever watched a movie and the main characters are, for example, in a high speed car chase. And in the middle of that high speed car chase, they slam into another car or drive another car off the road, and that car drives through a store window causing shoppers to dive for cover and glass is flying everywhere in a fantastic display of Hollywood special effects, and then the main characters continue on their way and the storyline abandons the driver of that other car and the the people who dove out of the way.
I’ve always wondered about those extra people. Surely they have a story to tell afterwards. Maybe the driver was on the way to the hospital where his wife was giving birth, but now he’s going to be late so she has an affair with the doctor immediately after child birth just to spite him. Or maybe the store owner was just telling an employee that the Wal-Mart down the street was trying to put him out of business and kill him to rid themselves of the competition, and the employee was telling him it was a ridiculous theory and then and car slams through the window and kills the owner and ruins the business.
That’s kind of how I feel about this storyline. After I switched gears from the exploding cat to the sub shop gag, you might have thought “Was that it? That’s where that storyline is going to end? Ok, I guess. But there’s still some unresolved stuff.” and then you just accept that the characters took care of that issue ‘off panel’.
And then BAM! I take you back to the story a day later and explain that, no, it was never taken care of. The mess hadn’t been cleaned up, and the cat hadn’t been buried. It turns out that Watterson was left unattended to suffer irreparable psychological damage and Karen flushed a cat down the toilet.
That’s what I’m here for.
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