News For 2010-09-09

Thanks to all the well-wishes after I posted the first page. It warms my cold, cold heart to see so many people willing to stick with me. It also boggled my mind when some people mentioned having read the archives of my old comics MULTIPLE times. I don't think I'VE actually read the archives of my comics multiple times (unless you count the constant revision of a particular strip during its creation as re-reading). Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy this crazy thing. It's a bit more densely plotted that it may seem at first glance. I've already outlined the story arcs quite a bit into the future, and this comic's gonna go to some pretty weird places before we're through. And I'll say this much - you should be pretty pleased with where we end up at times. Again I'll reinforce my promise - by the 24th page, at the end of the eighth week - you should be REALLY happy campers. I know I was thrilled when writing it.

This page took far longer to letter than I expected, since that's usually the fastest step of the whole damn process. Essentially, I wrote WAY too much dialogue for it. Thus, I spent most of my time editing and rewriting what I had in the script to fit the room I had on the page. Ultimately, as often happens when dealing with certain limitations, things actually got BETTER - I trimmed some fat and rewrote some lines. The punchline in that last panel wasn't actually in the script at all - I came up with it on the fly while trying to fit something funny into that space. Sometimes frustration breeds quality. Go figure.

This page is, for all intents and purposes, my cast page. Oh, sure, I'll eventually write a REAL cast page for new readers, but that seems rather low priority right now, given that EVERYONE is a new reader right now. The page itself reads as a bit "expositiony," but it was a quick and easy way to say, "Hey, these are the characters! Remember their names." Maybe it's a little too on-the-nose, but I've read SOME webcomics where the names of characters are hardly ever mentioned, if at all. I've actually read entire archives not remembering the names of the characters. Sad but true. Thus, I've now spotlighted and identified each character you need to know. Hopefully it'll work as a handy reference in the future.