from the less-than-three

Two strips in one week. Observe my vast speed at work. Soon I will rival even your fastest web-comic artists, like Fred Gallagher!
Kudos to Mary for the script on this one. I would never have thought of ending the arc this way had I been writing it, but fortunately for us all, Mary is and came up with something much more original and true to the character than I would have. It's also good to be challenged as an artist with something like this: how to stick to the script, yet incorporate IM conversations into the strip without plastering bloody great captions over everything (which I've seen other comics do, and I have probably done the same thing in the past.)
Captions, quite honestly, have become something of a bugbear to me: I think I OD'd on them last year when the strip was veering for the 'tell, don't show' end of the exposition tree (mostly because of my scripting, it has to be said) and now they seem very intrusive to me unless they're done for an explicit reason. Reading something like Sin City they flow more seamlessly with the text; for one thing, they're all personal narrations, and for another, it's stylistically necessary as a part of the whole 'film noir' feel Miller is shooting for. It's the notion of diegesis, mostly, that says anything that isn't directly present in the scene itself will only serve to distract the attention of the audience: an intrusive caption, thought balloons, fantasy sequences. Of course, all of these tools are part of the visual vocabulary of the comic art form, and to deny them entirely would be foolish. A caption is perhaps the most overused, however, as a shortcut for actual storytelling: a bad artist can cover themselves by simply writing expositional captions explaining just how upset the character is at that moment, instead of showing how upset the character is by body language, or even by the style of the art itself. (Expositional dialogue and thought balloons are also popular tools for this.)
Of course, I'm not actually scriptwriting for Shit Happens any more, since Mary's had that job since the start of the year. If I have problems with anything in the scripts -- which doesn't happen often -- Mary is always willing to listen to my concerns and, if she thinks they're justified, make changes accordingly. A lot of these stylistic scriptwriting notes I come out with in the rants, however, is derived from scripts I'm writing for other ideas, none of them anywhere near completion.

Overall, I'm just of the opinion that webcomic writers and artists should all be working to improve, to try new things, and make great Art.


DAVID'S DVD EASTER EGGS:

The Trillian conversation windows were created using two different screennames, sending the conversation in real-time. Only minor modifications to the screencapped windows were made, such as the date and the login names of the users.