The Last Days of Milton Hoight, part one

For the record, I was not crash-dancing around the place instead of writing a script over the weekend, as depicted in Monday's Dead Halifax Day strip. For the record, I wasn't dancing around like an idiot all weekend. For a couple hours on Saturday and several hours on Sunday, I was drunk -- at dinner with David and at my job's "You've survived Christmas!" party, respectively.

Also, to be fair, at any time David could have said, "Mary, get off your ass and write a strip!" but he's too nice to swear at me, and honestly, he's very happy to get a day off when he can.

But anyway, so now I'm back on track with scripts, David is watching Conan, and I'm gearing up for work tomorrow and a state job interview on Thursday.

As far as this script, I wasn't happy with it when I was writing it, because the dialogue felt a bit forced and I had to cut a panel in order to fit all of Rio's dialogue because David created a fucking verbose character in Rio, and I can't change that now, so for now, Rio cannot speak in contractions or monosyllabic words, and thus we end up with talking heads because there's no other way to get all of his long-winded speech into the panel.

I especially like Heidi measuring the curtains, though I accidentally wrote "Holly" on one panel in the script, which would have drastically changed the scene -- and the plot of the comic -- to have Ormrod asking Holly what she's doing in the office while she's measuring for curtains.

I thought I'd try something a bit different for the art on this one.
Okay, that's a lie. I started drawing the strip and it ended up being so absurdly detailed I couldn't face the thought of inking it and instead formulated an idea of how I could colour it on PotatoShop using a lot of time, a lot of patience, and the 'adjust hue' function (Ctrl + U, for anyone who uses PotatoShop). Which seems to have worked quite nicely, even if the process of saving it for web was typically lossy and took some of the nicer detail out of it. (Heidi's vacant chair in panel one became something of a red blob, for example.)

It's been a while since I've had to draw any of the characters out of this particular strip, though Ormrod is never too hard to do because he's simple -- broken nose with plaster, sunken eyes, bald head, and Professor Xavier squiggly eyebrows. And occasionally a Kiefer Sutherland-style Hamster face when he's particularly stunned by something.

As to Mary's criticisms about writing the script, then, well, that's the burden you have to take on. Some characters, as with some people, are verbose, and the art of making a verbose character do exactly what you need them to do without resorting to talking heads falls pretty clearly between the goalposts of 'writing'. Not that there's anything wrong with talking heads when it comes to particularly information heavy strips; it's just a little annoying when every single one of your strips is the same three people with one facial expression each standing in a coffee shop and making obscure in-jokes about indie bands and generally being the component parts of a fairytale fucking dream-world for little indie bois and grrls. Pointing no fingers at any other webcomic there. JEPH.