You might have noticed some strange rubbish going on above here. Somehow merely explaining that proved too great a task for me to do in a week-end, so I will try again on Monday.
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Ah-ha I see. I don’t just draw over the pictures from before because if I put them in different places or change the dialog, things are not guaranteed to fit properly. Also, in those mold days, when the lizard creature wore a coat, I drew the coat first without planning a body beneath it, and this lead to implausible proportions, sometimes almost monstrous when I didn’t draw the feet. Adding feet made the creature inexplicably small. Neither form consistently had legs. Clothing that forms its own body can be used to good effect, but I was not doing that. The stupid car was worse, and is still awful. It will always be awful. You could even make the case that it looks worse than it formerly did. I like the colors, at the least.
By this point I have removed most of the dialogue that I thought was awkward and the “story” fragments that did not make sense. Now the task is to find a place where this can link with the existing pages, though some of them need to be enlarged or have their text made more readable. But at least nobody is going to abruptly give up because the pictures were grainy uncolored pencil drawings (after one more of these). Though someone willing to put up with that because they found the material engaging in some way despite being ugly is probably someone I should be glad to have around.
I hope i am not expanding Treco’s part too much and wasting responses and actions that would be better used for subsequent “encounters.” There is probably a limited amount of things that arms stuck to a chair can do and still seem interesting.
I have become aware that the last row’s lines are less conspicuous than on the rows before it. There is a perfectly good explanation for that.
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PurpleSpace sez:
When I had originally read the black and white version, I had not realized the muffineater was the one that had actually injured the nemitz. Now I can also see the somewhat alarmed elpse!
I approve of bright colored birds taking a shower.
Infotainment sez:
See? It worked!
I must confess, I had never expected that Fred Basset would make a cameo appearance in this comic. As I understood it, ’twas always Drabble which had proved the greatest inspiration in your comicing capers. Or one specific floating Garfield for the more horrific moments.
Curiously, I wonder if the color of Muffineater’s tail orb’s speech bubble isn’t too close in color and sheen to the orb itself, to the point where it looks as though the orb is no longer speaking to the doorknob which wishes to be leed elone (as the orb no longer so strongly resembles it), but rather speaking to its very own speech bubble, which of course would not exist for it to speak to had it not first spoke to it, plunging us into an endless recursive nightmare.
Concerning Treco, I did not particular get the sense that the part was particularly expanded over previous version. In any event, Treco is one of the more striking characters in the first half of the first chapter anyway, so I would not worry all to much. In fact I’d say the character’s reduction to arms and a chair in fact serve to make biv more interesting, not less, by way of contrast. You need only worry if you are planning to modify all of your other character designs to amount to limbs and furniture as well.
Concerning the modification made to the previous page, the lamp toppling feels more satisfying now in terms of action causing it, but I still get the impression that the smaller size of the panel vis-a-vis the older version obscures the fact that the lamp is being overturned somewhat. I think part of the problem lies in the fact that the vase-like section of the lamp is too similar in color to the green of the background, which obscures the fact that it is a separate entity. Perhaps if the color were modified somewhat and a sort of wobbly motion line (not unakin to those of Treco’s hand) placed near it, the physical borders of the object and its present motion might be made clearer despite much of the lighting fixture’s being covered by the panel edge…?
Heapinfrimp sez:
spacko:
I approve of birds being more clean than previously, though I would encourage them not to waste water.
infote:
My concern about treco is that i will run out of things for it to do and should conserve the few that I come up with, especially now that I am reconsidering my plan to reveal the creature from the front at some point, or at least as soon as I thought it would be (which could still be years in the actual future, considering how this generally goes, but my mental concept has it occur very soon)
Orbs and lamps are changed easily enough, fortunately.
Another matter:
I never heard of Fred Basset before. Typing it into google reveals the familiar comic strip complaint “not funny,” which led me to some examples that seem more like simple cause and effect examples from language instruction courses than anything that is meant to be humorous. My own research revealed something trying even less hard. One writer insists that expecting the strip to be funny or to be anything at all is missing the point, which seems like a gag evaluation except that is on the wikipedia page and possibly sincere. I have seen more contemporarily-bred examples of “biography” comics, that are also pointless and miserable, but usually the authors aren’t paid (I hope). I remember one called something like “Bad Rabbit” in which a common setup was 1 my dog got hurt 2 but then my dog got better 3 then i ate delicious hamburgers. Then I read more of it than i ought to have because someone whose writing I enjoyed was subscribed to its update feed and I thought I might be missing something. Since then I have not missed it.
I never gussed there was a historical precedent for not -intending- to be interesting or do anything more than exist.
It seems to say “I don’t have a joke today so I am not going to dwell on the fact that I don’t, but here’s my dog again.” In the illustration field that is normal, but when I see a sequence of pictures I expect there to be a reason. Should I?
Fred Basset is one of the most conspicuously fonted non-“web” comic I have to this point encountered, although I gave up on the local newspaper’s offerings before font-usage became common. The dialog print seems to vary between a bad fancy font for the daily strips and a worse casual font for the sunday strips but not for any clear reason, since they both have the same dull art and depressing, often unfinished colors.
Indeed I might now think Fred would make a better orange swear word than a generic basset dog, if not for the sickly coloring leaving Fred more yellow, and almost greenish beside the bright red title letters.
PurpleSpace sez:
I recall reading Fred Basset a few times a remember it seemed to consist mostly of non-jokes. For instance, Fred wakes up and says to himself in his only-understood-by-animal-thought-bubble “Well, early to bed early to rise, I dare say.” And that would be the entire strip for a day. I made this up, but that was about the extent of what I saw.
Another strip I do remember that actually existed involved Fred’s owner on what appeared to be a subway. He then is surprised to find Fred is right beside him with Fred saying “You forgot your newspaper!” The strip implied that the owner commutes by subway and that Fred should not be there. So, that means Fred followed his owner all the way until he was seated on a train and no one asked why there was a dog wandering around unattended?
Heapinfrimp sez:
Your latter case seems bizarre and beyond the normal activities of a real dog, although I imagine the art job would have rendered it sad and mundane enough that it seemed ordinary. Rather more like Marmaduke. Marmaduke regularly does impossible things.
Your invented scenario seems more consistent with my experience. If you made a comic strip called Dead, That’s It in which every day you showed a different (or the same) picture of a skeleton for some reason in frames of varying sizes you would have a more functional humor attempt with only slightly less action.