November 6th, 2006

I almost went with a late update again, but I just could not bring myself to pull that this week, because this week is special. Ladies, gentlemen, and sentient amorphous blobs, I present to you, the 200th TMABB comic! Yay.

Most of the on-campus locations in Act 2 are based on real places at the University of Delaware. I originally had the food court at the Perkins student center in mind when I was working out the first panel there, but I ended up ad libbing it and just kind of working in the general feel and color scheme of the place. Close enough.

This is turning out to be a pretty difficult chapter to write. With Chapter 7, I knew exactly what needed to happen, and I knew how it needed to happen. This time, however, I only know what needs to happen at the end. Everything else between now and then is up for grabs. And so, I find myself feeling directionless as I write the scripts for these things. I’m barely staying ahead on scripts by a week, where I used to be ahead by months. Oh well. It feels more spontaneous right now, so at least the blessing is mixed, rather than absent.

I like doing dialog-heavy comics like this one. There’s a tendency amongst comic artists, especially in newspaper strips, to just copy and paste the same 3/4 view talking heads into every panel when all that’s really happening is characters saying things. Rather than succumb to that, I find I can make such strips more interesting if I concentrate as much as possible on having the characters go about their business as they chat. Seems obvious enough, but you hardly ever see it anymore, which means I am a special little boy.

Final note: why the frick didn’t anybody tell me that the links below the logo in the upper-left of the site were displaying with a massive space between the first and second lines in Internet Explorer? It’s fixed now. You know I have an email address, right?

CURRENT MOOD: Half-Pony, Half-Monkey