"I shoot all my employees"

Huzzah!

I got this week's comic done in plenty of time so I can spend some quiet moments during my weekend in Broadstairs getting ahead on the following weeks comic - which is longer and, judging by my thumbnail sketches, much more ambitious then what I've done so far. Eventually I'll probably cool out and settle into most strips being three to six panels instead of nine, but meanwhile I think it's worth the extra bit of struggle for the introduction of the main characters.

And for those who give a hoot and/or holler about the nitty gritty...

*The lines scanned a lot better this time around because I cowboyed up to a 2.0 pigment ink pen, only using the 0.5 for fine detail instead of everything.

*I think I'm going to stay with two pixels thickness for word bubbles but the search for good font continues. Until I find something better, I'm going to stand by what I used last strip - Kabel Dm BT 3.5pt

*I'm using the PNG format with the top level of compression (9) but what really made a difference in the size of the last strip was resizing it to be 800 pixels high (about a 50% reduction). Still, I feel like there is something I am missing so I'm going to experiment with other methods of image size reduction. The last strip was 474 kb - about a third of the first one - but I'd really like to get these down to at least the 150 kb range or even less, since I'm sticking with black and white at the moment.

I also think it's worth mentioning that the sense of accomplishment from drawing each panel has helped keep spirits flying much higher at Fort Brackenbury then they would if every single moment was spent job hunting. There is definitely something to be said for doing what you have to do to maintain a decent level of self-esteem while engaging in that particular grind - especially when there has been a long stint of "typical English weather". The boiling hot summer which I've been in fear of for months does not seem to be in a rush to arrive, which suits me just fine so long as there is a bit of sun while I'm inBroadstairs.

Basically what I am saying is that I want the weather to accommodate my needs and wants. All this being said, I should count myself fortunate not to be anywhere near the floods.

Finally, the title for this entry comes from the following VBS two-part series on bulletproof fashion.

Part One


Part Two