Five Watch Julian Piss Himself
16.02.05

These strips take a loooong time to do. But I get each of them done pretty much in a single day -- the reason for the big delays between them is that it takes me a few days to forget what it feels like to do the whole process.

Right now, the process is: writing a script, drawing panel layout thumbnails, pencilling the images for the panels, inking the images for the panels, scanning all the artwork, colouring the artwork on PotatoShop, putting the whole strip together on a new file at something like 800% of the final size, creating the frames to form panels, drawing the backgrounds in PotatoShop (I need to work on backgrounds next), lettering the strip, creating speech balloons... and then a final check to make sure everything's right (though by this point, I'm usually too tired to be bothered changing the errors if it's anything but a typo -- see Georgina's disappearing eyebrows in this strip) and then compacting everything to one layer, reducing to final size, and ruining the whole thing by reducing the colours so I won't arserape my bandwidth when I post it.

The extra time I'm putting in compared to the earlier 'Shit Happens' work is noticeable, and, I feel, worth it. (Annoyingly, the tiny differences that take no time at all to do are the ones that improve it most, like outlines for speech balloons, or scanning at twice the resolution. The things that take a lot longer, like coloured inking instead of flat black, or laying it out on a computer instead of doing the whole thing on one sheet of paper before scanning, only make it look marginally better. I suspect this is part of some fundamental law of art, in the same way that no-one notices a great background on a comic, but everyone notices a complete lack of background.)

Story-wise, I have no idea where this is going, beyond the next part or two. Shit Happens is back in March, and The Magnificent Five is just getting dropped at whatever point it's at then. If I feel like it, or if there's vast public demand, I'll do more at some point in the future.