2004

630- Wild Glower
Glower = facial expression like a grimace. At first Ourorya is all pumped about seeing the rare creature, but by the third panel he casually disposes of it while chewing on a soft pretzel. His behaviour mirrors my own creation of a character doomed to be discarded as soon as the cheap gag defining it is used up. There should be background in the second and third panels, but I hate drawing backgrounds. Do other people associate soft pretzels with the mall? I've never eaten one, since they seem nasty, but I think I've seen them sold at malls.
631- Whatever
This is how most of my converstions with my youngest brother and with my girlfriend go. A shitty joke is made, feelings are hurt, and childish taunting ensues. I now realize, also, that I should have had a floor-meets-wall-type horizon line in that third panel. Also, lines in Ourorya's hair. Oh well. I used relatively fat (>=03) drafting pens for the first half, and quills for the rest. I don't know if that's justified, though, since I shrink these down so much for the web anyway.
632- Me So Horny
I don't really like the grayscale computer shading I've been using for a while, but I don't have screentone, and I don't have the time to do color. I'd like to use just hand shading, but it's hard, and often looks ugly, as you can see here. I like the rockabilly necromancer guy in the second part of the second panel, though.
633- Spoiler Alert!!
More Tatanya treasure hunting. Gasoline Girl had this awful sneer in the original, I guess my hand slipped or something. I forgot to put bandaids on Tatanya's face in the third panel like I had intended. Oh well. And, the popular teacher from 624 makes a cameo appearance. The art turned out all right for being kind of half-assed. I would like to expand on the basic concept of finding and equipping treasure for your car, but I doubt I'll be able to, except maybe in the forum.
634- Cook/Chefbot
The idea for this came after I did the "not at the table" in which Robot's mom blows the magic horn that makes fart noises at the dinner table. It occured to me that it's pretty odd for the exoth crew to be eating dinner at a table. The idea of taping an antenna to something and then calling it "---bot" was concieved when we were toying around the idea of a SAC TV public access show.
635- Loogie
I kind of like the basic concept here, and it shows that Exoth is, in fact, powerful, which doesn't really come across normally, since he never does anything. Also the head-leg reaction-shot to having the loogie be praised when he earns only hatred was a nice gag. I'm always pleased when I can tack on a little joke like that; even if it's not that funny it's easy enough that it's still advantageous.
636- Candy Comes Out!
I wrote out the script for this one before I knew which character would be saying this stuff, and I had a hard time deciding who to plug into it. I was gonna use Chappy, but he would never shoot someone... he'd definitely stab them. And I really wanted the final panel to be shooting the poor bastard in the face. Ourorya would shoot, but he wouldn't kick somone out of the way first. In the end, I had to use Robot, even though this blurs the distinctions between his character and the others even more. Oh well.
637- Mail
There was a long span of lazy time between this one and candy comes out. The art is fair, even though it had been so long, my hand got tired before I was even halfway done with the inks. I actually planned out the blocking separately, so even thouch the 'camera angle' is different in each panel, the characters are all standing in the right place relative to one another. If there was any background to speak of, it would be much more impressive.
638- The Modular Chimaera
I don't know how many people know what a turducken is, but it's a cajun dish in which a roast turkey is stuffed with a chicken, which is stuffed with a duck, which is stuffed with crawfish or something. Anyway, that's what turducken is. Chimaeras show up in RPG and nerdy-type comics a lot, created by mad scientists. It's not always clear what drives people to make them, but I've never heard of them being made to be eaten.
639- Bone Apetit
This one was pleasently easy to draw, since it's mainly a verbal joke/jokes. I put too much shading on Chappy's arms, which are a bit messed up anyway. Having all those lines looks weird when his face and Victor's are all iconic.
640- Dirty Bomber
This is is the "something" Beireia and Tatanya were arrested for, as previously mentioned. I had hoped the smoke would look a little better... Also, there were several bits that I forgot to have on the original that I had to slap on in photoshop. The "no fuses, even" line was one of them.
641- The Lachrymator
This was supposed to follow the "dirty bomber" strip by just a couple of days, which is what the "meanwhile" bit is all about. I had trouble ending this, because basically, I kinda liked the lachrymator by the time I was almost done, and I didn't want to just kill him off. So, there's the ambiguous ending, where Enne's bag may or may not contain his severed head. I don't know if readers can identify Enne from behind, but that's who that is in the last panel. I also had a few other jokes that didn't make it into the final version, like Exoth saying something about how he should have put some kind of protection on the wireless network.
642- Voluntary Incarcerarion
As an experiment, I did this comic completely in photoshop, using the tablet. I thought it would save me time, but it ended up being much, much slower. Maybe three times as much time as usual. It looks a little better, except for the text, at least. I tried some new shading style, as well. Basically, the joke is that they know it's a trap, but they're going for it anyway. Basic formula has been used before, of course. This one has the cops being sneaky as its distinguishing bit.
643- Jailbreak
I went back to the traditional ink and paper for this. It took longer than I remember them taking. I was pretty sloppy with the whole thing, especially the non-main-character items... I was dreading panels two and three, but I just plowed through them, without worrying too much about quality, and it turned out alright anyway. I just wish I had picked a consistent style to do the waves of acetone in. (acetone is the solvent in nail polish remover, incidentally.)
644- Head-Leg is Revolting!
This one was fairly easy to do, even though there's backgrounds in almost every panel. Head-leg, as you can imagine, is not very hard to draw. You may have noticed, but Head-Leg is supposed to be like the whole Frankenstein's monster, so him turning against his maker, and seeking to defile that which he (his maker - Exoth) loves (treasure), was inevitable.
645- Head-Leg is Revolting, Too!
Man, talk about layout problems. First, I made the golf cart have right-side steering without realizing it. Actually, in most of the thumbnails, it was US standard, but I changed some things, and to make the speaker near their dialogue in the panel, I had to switch sides, which I did without thinking about it. Then, in order to keep it consistent, I had to switch sides in the next two panels w/ golf cart. That caused a fair amount of trouble. Then, in the Decapitation panels, I didn't give myself enough room. If you'll notice, there's no ceiling on the second-to-last panel. Also, the transitions from panel to panel are pretty abrupt, the action doesn't flow well at all. I'm not really good at action, and it's hard to fit it into a strip format, anyway.
646- Head-Leg is Revolting: Final
The action here is a bit awkward, but that's the way it goes. A lot of close-ups of Exoth, with his hair going all over the place, which was a pain in the ass to draw. I decided not to hold myself to particularly strict standards there, which turned out all right. I'm finding that if I don't worry about quality of the art much, everything works out much better. At least, the comics come out faster, and that's really all that matters. I wanted to have Exoth expound on his plan for torturing Head-Leg, but there wasn't any room. I'll probably do it in a filler. I also was thinking about making some kind of crack comparing him ot a suicide bomber in the last panel, but couldn't think up anything clever, so I abandoned it. I did some suicide bomber jokes with snid, may as well leave it at that. Oh! by the way, Head-Leg died from the energy backlash when the toe with the ring was severed. That's why he never says anything after that, not because I'm a sloppy writer, honest.
647- Private Eye
I find Beholders inherently funny. I guess it's that sort of attitude that makes Irritability inaccessible to a lot of people, but with my update schedule, I'm never going to get a huge following anyway, so I may as well preach to the choir, so to speak. Anyway, I really don't like how Beireia turned out in the first panel, but all the other art is fine. I tried, in the first panel to have Polly (the nameless co-worker) saying something really asinine about not liking mondays, since her schtick is the ironic corny office-humor. Anyway, I think I succeeded in that a bit too much... I can't help but think that's going to make people hate her. Assuming they don't already.
648- High School Drama
This is the lead-in to a Magical Girl storyline. Tatanya's acting a bit more evil than is usual, but she was never really a good-goody. The art is alright, but Gasoline Girl looks pretty weird in every panel she's in. The popular algebra teacher is named, here, at least her last name. The pullover Tatanya's wearing doesn't look quite how I'd like, but at least it isn't all shiny like it was at first.
649- High School Drama II
Okay, the Magical Girls I promised are here, but instead of the typical beautiful, confident girls typical of the genre, it's a bunch of awkward, non-confrontational nerds. hilarious. If you aren't familiar with it, 'magical girl' refers to this very formulaic subset of Japanese animation, also called 'Japanese cartoons'. Basically, normal girls go through a transformation to take on another identity, fight a generic evil with very formal attacks, and there's some cute creature, the 'mascot', which guides them on their transformation. The Lovely Justice Warriors are a very poor representation of this, which is the basic joke here. There's a ton of screen toning going on here, total pain in the ass. It's so much easier to deal with Chappy and Exoth.


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