Interlude

BC&U (formerly BCN&U), Halifax's employers, apparently still haven't worked out he's thirty-odd months late for work and have in fact made good on requests submitted by Halifax and Holly last year. His car's been a long time in coming. In fact, if I was the one writing the scripts instead of Mary, it probably would have never got there: as I've stated many, many, many times, I Hate Drawing Vehicles.
This time, however, I put in copious research (I looked up more than one picture of the desired model of car) and made sure the vehicle had most of its bits in the right place. Unlike the prototype one I scribbled on my thumbnails for this strip, which looked like something a half-retarded three year old might draw if they'd been severely burned in a fire and could only grip the pencil using their left foot while being bitten by radioactive fire ants. Well okay, maybe not quite that bad, but you get the idea.

One of the major changes that I always immediately notice between this year and previous years of Shit Happens is that I now make glass transparent in foreground objects; the cheap-and-easy cartoonist way of doing it is to make the glass either opaque or else opaque apart from prominent details. (I did that a lot in Year Zero with Halifax's glasses, for example.) Of course, that's a perfectly valid thing to do in cartooning, but since this whole art-thing is meant to be an experiment for me, that usually means I put more work into things as time goes on instead of working on downshifting toward some kind of level of iconic abstraction like a sane person would.


DAVID'S DVD EASTER EGGS:

Across the street from Myra's Daycare and the Something Positive STD clinic, we can sort-of glimpse 'Unquestionably Malcontent', the coffee shop Shakra was sitting in during the Year Zero strip linked to in the previous rant.