ah ha 18 hours later I thought of a purpose for this scene while sketching out the next nemitz-lope-elpse page, as it helps set up something else “story”wise that I was not certain how to set up, so I likely will include it or a piece of it. Kumquat WAS the original main character, and it seems to me now bizarre that I would consider omitting a scene containing that character when they are already in short supply simply because it contained no action, but I don’t like when people in fictional media stand around talking for prolonged periods, even if it has some amount of relevance, . i prefer for information to be delivered while something else is happening. This was hardly kevin smith “characters in movie talking about another movie” level unnecessary but if I were close to that I would quit making this comic strip and simply go partake of whatever commercial item i was having the characters talk about, because it would mean my passion lay elsewhere and passion is what keeps a slow, free, silly project like this going.

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The past year ish, apart from the dumb virus and dumb trump club has preferred me to spend time on things other than the bimshwellian comicoid, which itself is sending me mixed messages about how to complete the next section. Sometimes i have characters theoretically argue with each other and that gives me clues but this one doesn’t seem to be reaching a conclusion. at first I thought it was a needless exchange that didn’t necessarily need to be included, then it seemed like it might go somewhere, then it didn’t. I definitely don’t want to draw 40 consecutive panels of just kumquat and yibric talking about nothing, but also sometimes additional details that come to me while drawing the panels help point me toward a more meaningful version of the exchange. I can postpone this part since it is separate from what other characters are doing, but I am also postponing the next part with the gnomes in the lizard’s apartment, because I am not sure which or how many to draw in there, and if there should be a neutral page of them in there before what I want to happen to them in there occurs, and that can’t happen until after the next dumb things that the lizard does.

I colored yibric’s lines but not kumquat’s because the html code is tedious and if you had difficulty visually distinguishing colors there is no way you would have been able to follow my pictures-in-boxes mess up to this point.

1 Hey kay kay, the stuff’s not here. I found the darts but no glob.
I warned you never to call me that!
2 is that your prime concern about this?
should I be concerned?
3 you said to deal with “the rest,” I figured the absence of the rest would mean something
it may mean that elpse has reabsorbed the material
4 and…?
we therefore need not clean it up
5 i think you are being deliberately silly in an attempt to antagonize me
hm hm hm the tables have turned!
6 if elpse reabsorbs the material then your antidote failed!
OR you sabotaged my antidote!
7 why would I do that?
I do not know why you would do that
8 there fore, lacking evidence, you have no foundation to accuse me of having done that
I did not accuse, I merely supposed
9 well suppose you hurt my feelings, would you like that?
I have feelings! You have schemings! And you brought this up anyway!
10 fine then I drop it! let’s go!
FINE then! We will go!
11 then we are harmonious!
then why do I feel so sad?
12 (because I actually DID sabotage the antidote! Tee hee heap!)
you had better not be think-laughing at me!
13 hey look it’s the dope
indeed
14 don’t you think it is strange to find the dope out here?
not exactly. It probably climbed out of the goop pool on my partially submerged chair and followed elpse thinking elpse was a dope because I injected elpse with with the same material from which dopes were made.
15 you have a strange perception of what isn’t strange
AND as I also inject myself with dope material I much prefer it to follow elpse, which it should continue to do following your meddling.
16 you COULD just blast it with its yellow antidope. why were you keeping it?
I was keeping it away from me!
17 OKAY BUDDY then why bother trying to uncurse elpse if you don’t care that you failed?
I was testing my creation, and that concluded the test! Your deed has foiled elpse, not me.
18 pog would see it differently
pog is ignorant of the specifics and will see what I show.
19 pog’s judgement matters to you! Why not my own?
because YOU relish it! Pog suffers from compassion.
20 I may tell pog
to spite me?
21 pog will regard me as morally superior to you
you are not
22 hence why I can do that without any psychological consequence. What is your excuse?
I do not need to explain myself to you!
23 how do you explain you to you?
I avoid doing so.

I don’t much know why I bother counting because it is the amount of dialog and the complexity of the drawings that dictate how many panels should [reasonably] be on one page, not simply how many times I require myself to draw each set of characters. In the past I have mentioned that planning for 16 frames consistently fails because I always want to cram in more than I initially expected and planning for 12 is safer. And also I have had to re-edit plenty of too-cramped pages into slightly larger numbers of slightly less cramped pages already. And ALSOer when reviewing other RECENT pages, to try and re-determine where I was in this and which lines from the terribly disorganized script document i had already made use of, the ease with which I could read the dialog varied considerably, despite my belief that I had greatly increased the clarity over what was acceptable to me back when I had the first comic book made. These pages were made fresh AFTER I had broken up earlier crowded pages, meaning I carried the awareness that such a situation should be avoided going forward, and I plainly have failed to avoid it! I shall need to break up and re-compile many more. 16 may simply be too many panels for one page, even a well-planned page, if I insist on hand-lettering them, and obviously I do. I could stand to fuss less over varying the letter styles because I lack proficiency in that despite nearly 20 years of experience. I may need to limit how many strange things that nobody else does that I do in order to have any hope of making this production coherent outside my mind. And once in while I even do break some of the obsessive compulsive habits that drive this forward without sending it off the road to its death. Instead it comes to a solid halt in the street. Nobody else drives on this street. It is lonely but it means I have time to fix this atrocious metaphor.