20/08/07: 'Arriving home once more'
How many chapters have started with the front of that damn house? Still, it was nice to draw it all blowed up for a change. I know the explosion pattern makes no sense, but does it really matter? I'm actually very happy with the first panel, since the destruction is clear and pretty complete. The last panel... well, I should have put some more work in, but I was short on time.
22/08/07: 'What? You didn't think I would draw something that wasn't really *there*, did you?'
Okay, I know that 'signposts' - those stupid little messages next to characters in manga which are something like the artist's commentary/mockery on what the character's doing or saying - are a bone of contention in webcomics and that I do occasionally stick them in. I find them quite amusing but I've seen them top several people's lists of 'stuff I'm sick of seeing in webcomics'. For those people, this is probably going to come across as a tedious attempt to justify my use of signposts in the comic, but that's not the idea.
The idea for the chapter came from wondering what would happen in exactly the situation shown. It's not quite breaking the fourth wall, just changing the hangings. As we shall see, I added some patented Drunken Scribblings taking-a-silly-idea-too-far powder to the mix, and a wacky and weird chapter has resulted. It's not going to be popular with everyone, but hopefully you'll bear with me until autumn when we return to more serious business.
A few notes on the police officer's speech in the background here; the scorpion pit line is stolen from Terry Prattchett, mostly just because I find it funny, but also because I'm getting a little bit worried about civil liberties (hence the rest of the speech, which is already more or less accurate about the state of civil liberties in Britain, and becoming more so at a frightening rate - not counting the bit about lawyers, which has been true but largely ignored for centuries
) in my home country. I'd like to stress that I wrote the speech as it appears on the page the day *before* going to see The Bourne Supremacy (it's very good), so this isn't some kind of paranoid knee-jerk, it's a genuine worry about the powers police already have in this kind of case (and, unfortunately, sometimes those powers are justified. I'm just glad I'm white, bespectacled, have unusually long and curly hair, and don't live near any Muslims - not because I'm afraid of them, but because I'm afraid of the way the police act towards folk because of their beliefs).Tink
