Sneaky Monkey

A strip with very little dialogue in it like this one means I have more room to mess about with the art and make it stupidly detailed. Which then eats up all the filesize the text would otherwise have taken up.
This is the kind of strip where the 'three tiers' format I tend to go for (since most of the scripts work out to seven or eight panels, and dividing them into tiers of three tends to work quite well) seems much more planned than it actually is. In having the three settings of house, street, and pharmacy each take up a separate tier, it's almost like this is intended to be three different newspaper format strips that go together as one. Obviously the middle tier wouldn't work so well on its own, but all three of the tier do have a kind of 'ending' to them that leads on to the next part (or, in the case of the final one, provides a concluding note.)

If you're wondering, Halifax is reading 'Monkey' by Wu Ch'eng-En, as translated by Arthur Waley, for no better reason than it's the book I'm reading right now and the script called for him to be reading a book. The cover is fairly accurate. The blurbs on the back are not.

In addition, the pharmacy - much like the Sexual Health Clinic - has a comic-related name. The Chemistry Set is a group of semi-pro comic book creators banding together to create free webcomics: this kind of 'band' mentality is one that can be seen in groups like the wonderful Dumbrella, the brilliant Act-I-Vate, and the... let's-skip-the-adjective Dayfree Press. (Okay, I like Dinosaur Comics and White Ninja from Dayfree. They're not all bad.)
Though the idea of the 'band' of webcomic creators is a nice idea, everyone seems fuzzy at best on how to implement this in any kind of useful way; for the most part it gets treated as a record label that the different creators are distributed from and that handles the marketing, etc. I'm hoping that where even Act-I-Vate (the only other one to use semi-pro and full-pro creators) fell down, The Chem Set will manage to achieve some success. By this I'm specifically referring to the idea that this 'label' or 'band' is going to actually have a decent idea of community about themselves and we're going to be able to see them riffing off each other, learning from mistakes of other labelmates, and ultimately, through trial-and-error and some hearty (and openly available) discussion, we'll see them Making Better Comics for it.


DAVID'S DVD EASTER EGGS:

Although it's been alluded to a few times, this is one of the clearest signs we've yet had that Halifax lives in the Gothereswick region of Manchester.