Blue Van Man

With my horrible track record when it comes to drawing vehicles, I'm surprised this one came out so well. The monitoring equipment in the back of the van was Mary's idea (this is because she was exposed to 'True Lies' at a young age, and has never quite recovered) and was a great suggestion -- it meant very little work on creating backgrounds. In fact, pretty much any enclosed space works as an easy set of backgrounds -- maybe I should pitch a comic in which two closeted gay men are quite literally in a closet for the whole thing.
Mary and I debated for a while on how best to handle this strip, and in the end we came to a compromise, cutting down Halifax's monologue about his past unseen exploits and paring a little bit out of Rio's conversation with Kali so that the two parts could both fit in the same strip.
Writing as a team is hard work. When it works, it works very well, and when it doesn't work, it just doesn't work at all.
We are both egotists at heart, which means we have to sit down to write the scripts with an open mind and preferably without the whole thing written out in our heads. I'm probably more guilty of overruling Mary than she is of overruling me; and when I look back, on some strips, I kick myself for having gone with my own idea out of selfish instinct when hindsight allows me a more objective view of things.
I'm also guilty of deliberately writing artistically undemanding scenes when I feel like I need a break. A talking heads strip with Rio, however, never falls into this, because I find him really difficult to draw with any kind of consistency. Mary likes to go for the visual hits, which is probably better for me as an artist in the long run, even if I complain at the time. (Which I do. Always. I complain constantly whenever I have to draw anything for this comic and then get uppity if anyone badmouths the artwork.)

It's worth bearing in mind when you read this comic that the whole thing is an experiment: it's one of the very, very, few webcomics with two writers working on the scripts, which some other comics really could benefit from, just to give the creator a reality check every now and then. It's also possibly the only one being written by a male-and-female writing partnership. We're already coming up with some ideas for next year's storylines, mostly based around the fallout from this year's whole arc. It looks like we're heading towards some shorter, punchier arcs and one-offs next year -- there won't be as much background reading required, that's for sure.