Carpet Ninja

I went through about five or six false starts before I finally wrote this script. I kept trying to write various ones of Vince talking to Halifax about Holly, and Holly talking to her sister Ginger about Halifax, or strips cutting between the two conversations, but none of them quite seemed to gel properly. It seemed easier to go straight back to Halifax and Holly, rather than showing them talking about each other to third parties. It's pretty clear how they feel about each other, I think, without having to spell it out by having expositional monologues or third-party characters interrogating them like a FAQ file. Besides, it's nice to have some kind of mystery to things. Maybe how they react to each other is nothing like how they really feel... or maybe it is. It'll be more fun to bring that up when it's relevant rather than doing strips to get it out into the open before it needs to be.

Vince is fast becoming one of my more favourite characters. In many ways he's the replacement for Shakra, but he's a completely different character to write. Shakra was a more active character, driven largely by his discontentment and his unfulfilled sexual urges. Vince is a completely passive character -- it doesn't get much more passive than lying prone on the carpet -- who seems to be in a drug-induced state of complete contentment. And though he's expressed an interest in girls a couple of times (in his first couple of appearances last year, at least) he doesn't seem to really care that much one way or the other.

In case you're pedantic and you're wondering where Halifax's green rotary-dial phone is, he's using a different one today, which Vince has brought from his flat. If you check out the pre-Halloween strip from last year, you can see Vince using the same phone. The fact that it's a stoner's telephone also explains why it has takeaway restaurants on the speed-dial.

I was just looking at the strip when doing the HTML for this page and trying to think of something to write here. After looking at it for a good five minutes, after reading a dozen or so times, after the three or four proofreads I give each strip while still in PotatoShop (which is three or four more than these rants ever get) I noticed a mistake.

And not a little mistake. Not a slight colouring error, not an overlap problem where a layer was too far forward. No. I had Holly asking if Vince wanted pizza and answering it herself, like some kind of insane multiple personality disorder sufferer. I've done this before, with speech, but I usually notice before I'm even done with the balloon layers, and I've always caught speech errors, at the latest, proofreading.

What's annoying is the number of times I read and re-read that whole strip without noticing the mistake. I have scripts that tell me who is saying each line that I can refer to if I want, if for some reason I was in doubt. It's just a problem caused by trying to finish off the strip far too fast for my own good. Luckily, it was easily remedied, since I save multi-layered PSD files of each strip, partly just in case of things like this. Grr.

Best bits: Holly's increasingly bizarre turns of phrase; Mary pointing out that PotatoShop 7 has an automatic shadow function that saved me a shitload of time.
Worst bits: The (failed) attempts at perspective in the Vince panels; the near-miss on the bad speech balloons.