page 843 – a few feet away
Well, this was kind of… weird and embarrassing. I sat down to work on today’s page, and… well… I had nothing. I had absolutely NO idea what today’s page was going to be. Oh, I’ve got plenty more material for the rest of this arc, that’s no problem. But I’d somehow completely forgotten any kind of transitional page to get us TO all that stuff. And I spent HOURS trying to come up with something, ANYTHING to fit the bill. Eventually, I just… started drawing. No actual joke in mind, no plan, just random doodling. And somehow, THIS is what occurred. Terrifying mutant food bugs.
Also, now that I used the “Bread and Butterflies” gag, I’ll have the Golden Afternoon song from Alice in Wonderland stuck in my head all day.
Oh, and despite my utter failure to plan ahead regarding the main comic, I’ve got some astonishing news! I ACTUALLY GOT TODAY’S VOTING INCENTIVE FINISHED ON TIME!!!
EDIT: It’s been rightly pointed out that the Character Profiles have been HORRIFICALLY out of date for a very long time. Yeah, I take forever to update anything. But it just dawned on me that, technically, the profiles themselves have been done for AGES already. The hold up has been the new characters to go WITH the profiles, since, you know, it doesn’t do much good to look up information on a character you don’t know the name of if there’s no picture to go with it. Still, incomplete information is probably better than no information at all, so I’ve gone ahead and put some text-only versions of the pages up. So go check it out and see just how many frickin’ characters are in this thing at this point!
(Historical Notes: Insert “and now I have to do it again” remark HERE. On a more interesting note, the comments caught on to the oddness of talking about Avatar’s age, which is just one of the MANY things not being definitively addressed. We know for a fact that Avatar’s indestructibility means she’s physically incapable of aging, which makes it all but certain that she’s older than she looks. HOW much older is way up in the air, though, and NOT just because I don’t want to get stuck dealing with continuity issues. While Avatar can definitely be said to have a level of maturity above the other characters thanks to both extra real-time experience and her massive backlog of recorded knowledge, in other ways she’s the LEAST grown up character in the cast. I mean, it’s not like she ever DOES anything, ya know? She has no job, no responsibilities, no expectation of ever growing up, no real goals beyond “know stuff,” none of the motivations that drive most people to mature. Thus, Avatar can simultaneously act more AND less childish than any of the other characters depending on the situation, and neither one necessarily indicates her true age… though, yes, I also don’t want to be nailed down to a definitive date when the Cap’n brought her onboard. That is still true.)
@ Historical Notes: Even ignoring the exact date Cap’n brought Avatar on board, Avatar could have easily been in space for at least a decade, if not many decades. It’s even possible for her to have spent more than a century floating in space before joining the Cap’n on his first flight, and spent most of her time since then catching up on advancements and changes that have occurred during that time. Why, then would people, some Mad Scientists, to be exact, only learn about her recently? Because she was forgotten about after being shot out into space, and only came back into the public eye after being picked up. I can fully see a Mad Scientist who only just heard about Avatar in the last week or two thinking “Oh, she’s transformed Princess Rheiko, it explains EVERYTHING my fanfic senses want it to!”
I almost responded with a statement that included information which hasn’t been mentioned in a comic yet. Let’s all pretend that didn’t happen. 🙂