Far Out There

AND SO IT BEGINS! …with lots of dots!  Yeah, as I mentioned before, I’ve wound up using this year’s batch of Christmas comics to experiment with some stuff.  Specifically, I want to try and get better at the whole screentone shading thing.  In theory, I’m doing it here because I thought it’d fit the material to adopt a bit more of a newspaper comic look… though if I’m honest, the thing the pages I’ve finished so far ACTUALLY remind me of is more the graphics on the old Macintosh computer we had when I was a kid.  BUT ANYWAY, yes, we’re back to doing a whole story for Christmas this year instead of another montage of pictures, and it’s a story all about Astrid!  Actually, my original intention was to NOT do a story-driven series just because I worried that would be too much work… but then I couldn’t come up with a theme for random Christmas pictures that I could get sufficiently excited about doing.  Eventually, I just did the whole “Okay, seriously, what would I be most interested to see if I was just READING these?” thing, and the first thing in my head was Astrid in a pile of Christmas trash, starting off a Sunset Boulevard-style flashback.  And then I managed to bash out the whole story in a fraction of the time I’d spent trying to AVOID writing something.  Funny how that works, huh?

Oh, and assuming that I don’t forget to swap things out between when I queue this page and when it goes live, there SHOULD be a new TWC Voting Incentive up too!  And if I forgot, well, check again tomorrow.  I really DID manage to get something drawn, I promise!