Kiss, Command, or Promise

This strip took forever. Like many of the others that I say took forever, it's because I had to draw lots of large images that then invariably got cut down for the final version. It's not too bad in this one, with the exception of panel five, which was pulled further back so you could see Halifax's torso and Holly's knees on either side of him. Panel six is cropped almost to the point that I could cry. Not because of the emotion involved between them -- nope, because I drew a FULL BODY shot on that one and then ended up cropping it to their faces. I could cry. Or kill. Watch out in Manchester - it's Friday the Thirteenth this week, and I think I can claim Friday 13th fever in my defence if I butcher someone in the street.

This strip didn't actually end up too badly, considering the artistic annoyance that went into it. It takes a long time to colour and shade all those panels: that's why Vince was re-used from an earlier strip. I simply didn't have time to draw and colour him again in what was meant to be exactly the same pose as an earlier strip. The couch ended up being stock footage in every panel it appears in, albeit slightly desaturated so that the vivid orange didn't overshadow the foreground characters.

It's also worth noting that this strip is one of the very, very, few that I've drawn in year two in which I didn't have a complete script sitting in front of me before I started work. I planned this strip in my head, in terms of actions, and wrote a script consisting of just panel descriptions -- no dialogue. And I don't think it suffered for that -- the dialogue came pretty naturally when I was lettering it, and it all seems to flow rather well.

Best bits: the body language between the two of them, the shading in panel four.
Worst bits: the fact that I had to crop panel six so severely. Sob.