Spring Cleaning

As you may have noticed I'm giving the site a bit of a design tweak. There are over 3,500 pages(!) of content on this site now, so this will take a bit of time to complete. Please pardon the dust while we remodel...

Episode 418

Read the comic here.

Whiskey is remembering the question he asked all the way back in Episode 77. Originally I was going to make a joke about "never vacuuming", with a comeback from Donut about "the explosive decompression at the end of Chapter One not good enough?" but I couldn't get the timing to work right. Plus the link between "vacuum" and "explosive decompression" was weak at best.

Anyway.

I'm looking forward to the reveal tomorrow of where the Brick House ended up. Aren't you?

Episode 362

Read the comic here.

There's an alternate version of this strip - you can see it here. In it, Whiskey's exit is much more dramatic. The only difference is that the last two panels are flipped, but it really changes the flow and feel of the event.

I wasn't sure which to go with, so I let some friends see both versions to get their comments. Almost universally they liked the first version better. As my wife put it: "Only Whiskey would be a big enough dork to ruin his own dramatic exit."

For those of you grumbling that this would be a week of people just talking in a coffee shop, don't fret. Tomorrow's strip occurs outside.

Episode 303

Read the comic here.

Tuesday, Part I.

The first draft of this strip is here.

I was in the process of writing this blog post when I realized that the Alert needed to make some sort of sound...I was writing down what the joke should have been when I realized there was no reason I couldn't go an actually fix the strip...it had only been up for a couple of minutes.

So I did.

Episodes 284 and 285 AND 286

Read the comics here and here AND here.

A triple comic update. Man, I hope I don't need to do too many of these. I thought it'd go quick, but trying to figure out how to handle 286's effects took waaaay too long.

Things that I almost did, but didn't:
Draw big cartoon "X"es over the LOLCat's eyes in 284
Have Morpheus-Cat licking at the blood with "Lick Lick Lick" sound effects

Yeah, there's a reason I went with the "Santa-tised" thing. Sometimes my head is a scary place to live in.

Oh: Further reading for those of you who didn't get the Black Cat/Firecracker joke.

Episode 277

Read the comic here

Yes, I'm poking fun at the lateness of this strip in the first panel. It's not often I miss a day; sadly life has been a bit hectic these past couple of weeks.

My first draft had Pinky and Fox talking about donating some of the gems to Whiskey to pay for fire damages. It really didn't work after the reveal that the fire wasn't a fire, though. I think the new dialog is much funnier, anyway.

Episode 271

Read the comic here.

For those of you who don't know the song, Zombie Wash is singing snippets from Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady". At this moment he's either channeling Garth from the Wayne's World movies, or perhaps Slick from the S-Team.

The original script had Wash simply going "Foxy Lady! I like!" in panel two with a stunned silence in panel three. When I was laying out the strip I realized I had a problem in panel four - Fox's voice bubble needed to be on the left, with Whiskey's on the right...and the tails on those bubbles would cover up Wash.

So...rather than take new photos from the reverse angle to fix the dialog problem, I worked the problem into the strip. Lazy? You bet.

Episode 268

Read the comic here.

The first draft of this episode ended with:
Morpheus: Just make sure nothing happens until then.
Wash: With this strip? Not a problem.
Narrator: HEY!

Two things made me change that:

First, I'm tired of my characters taking cheap pot-shots at me.
Second, things have actually been moving forward at a pretty good clip lately. And with daily strips on the way in December...it just didn't ring true.