Penniless Jobless

It's no secret that the characters in this comic, for the most part, are based on people -- though only the main few retain the look of the person, or even a single identity. (Kali, for example, ended up being several people's bad sides - myself included.)

Halifax is - or was - me, though in the last fourteen months he's moved quite a way into being a character in his own right. His anger is mine. Some of his opinions are. The cross-dressing is not mine, nor is the vast amount of sexual partners.

Holly is, whether it was intentional or not, my girlfriend Mary. They've got similar height, similar hair, similar facial structure and eye colour. Some of Holly's lines of dialogue are Mary's (such as the 'Is it Holly's bedtime?' from a few strips ago. Except she used her own name. Obviously.) Most of this was never a conscious decision - it all just sort of happened. Up until a few months ago, Halifax's ex-wife looked very different indeed, and then suddenly I was trying to sketch her out one day and she became a softer, smoother, altogether pleasanter looking character. (Pleasanter? Where's that fucking paperclip when you need it?) The hair just worked like that, without my trying to make it like Mary's hair. The eye colour, when I came to colour her first appearance, just looked best as that - completely unplanned. Even the lines I've plagiarised off my own girlfriend until this point have all been done because they were just the best lines -- not because they were said by someone who seems to have been the subconscious basis for the character.

Until today. The daycare job is very intentionally Mary's old job when she lived in Washington state. The story about the guy is one she told me - and refreshed me on today - even down to what the guy looked like. The only difference is that she wasn't the person the bad parent hit on -- that was one of her work colleagues, who excused herself to go and punch things in a back room. Had it been her, Mary says, she would have twatted the guy one and had done with it.

There were actually a few more balloons of dialogue for this strip. I cut two entire panels from the first draft of the script, by merging dialogue into other panels or else deleting it entirely. When everything was laid out, I started cutting dialogue again, and had it down to what I thought was the bare minimum. When I started lettering, however, I ended up cutting even more - extraneous words from some parts, and in other parts, I started to realise the strip still worked without whole balloons of dialogue.

I find that happens quite often with dialogue (although not usually to this extent) when I'm doing the final lettering job in PotatoShop. I think it would help a lot of people who want to write comics to actually draw them up, because it's quite hard to gauge how much you can fit on a page, panel-wise, and how much dialogue you can fit in a panel. I think I could probably do this comic for years on end and never quite manage to write a script that translated to the page perfectly and, more importantly, that I thought was a good comic page.

Best bits: Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince.
Worst bits: background slightly off. Look at those huge windows.