Halifax, Agony Aunt

This strip was an absolute nightmare to do.

I went through four or five scripts before I wrote one even vaguely like this, then spent a few hours trying out different punchlines, none of which really worked, or else turned out to be stolen from elsewhere. Then when it came to pencil the strip, I realised that Tara was actually a lot harder to draw than she ever had been previously. The second panel, with the two of them sitting on a bench, took me a couple of hours by itself, and that was just working out how to get her looking right. The front-on shot of her was even worse: it took several attempts and something like three different noses, two pairs of eyes, and eight chins to make her look recognisably Tara-esque. Then there's the panel where Tara's crying. Fuck that was a nightmare and a half to get right. I tried half a dozen different poses for her to be in, with her hands covering different parts of her face, but whatever I tried didn't seem to work too well. Most of the time she came off as having man-hands. In the end I decided to go look up some photo reference.

You try looking up people crying on a Google Image Search. Try it. All you'll find are pages and pages of ugly babies bawling their stupid ugly lungs out. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I looked up tsunami survivors and found a picture of a distraught relative of one of the victims. Yes, I am now Going Straight To Hell. But the important thing is, the person was crying, and it looked good in my comic.

By reading this comic you have been also damned and will go to hell with me. So there.

Best bits: that crying panel when it FINALLY worked; the half-arsed park that actually looked half-decent.
Worst bits: Tara's chin in the straight-on panel; the punchline wasn't as good as it would have been if I hadn't found out I was accidentally stealing one from the Batman animated series and changed it.