page 1034 – costuming debate
Is today’s comic late because I was up all night doodling new costume designs for Layla? Yes. Yes it most certainly is. I’m not even gonna try to come up with an excuse this time. See, this is what happens when I lock the Voting Incentives into an ongoing story and can randomly have Tabitha stick other characters into silly outfits for a few weeks: that stuff starts to bleed into the main comic.
I actually used to have a stash of reserve Layla costume designs for later use… but it turns out it’s already past “later” and I’d used them all at one point or another. Not that it would have helped out here much, since the overwhelming majority of them weren’t dress related. Layla’s just such a practical, no-nonsense character that it’s just kind of unnatural to draw her in something as non-functional as a dress. At least, not something that would actually appear as more than a one-off. Incidentally, don’t expect to see any of these outfits again anytime soon, since this is basically a dumping ground of all the ideas that I knew I’d get sick of drawing over and over again for one reason or another. ESPECIALLY that one with the stripes. Can you imagine me trying to get that one to look even remotely the same from one panel to the next? I dunno WHAT I was thinking.
And last but not least, NEW VOTING INCENTIVE!
(Historical Notes: And, of course, it’d turn out that I didn’t actually like ANY of these costumes. I can’t remember if that was ever the plan, or if it really was just a case of me waiting too long to design Layla’s new outfit, not liking the “final” one, and calling a do-over. I mean, given the general state of things by this point, it’s probably the later, but this is one case where I actually think the end result works BETTER than just a straightforward “and she picks a good outfit right away” montage would have. So much of the unplanned stuff lately has turned out “meh” that I have trouble believing this one could have turned out well without some kind of intention behind it.)
So, most of this new stuff, unlike the cowgirl dress, doesn’t really look like what she would have gotten at the space truck stop where she shopped – so I’m guessing this is some of the extra boxes that Tabitha brought along. Which means she’s basically playing Tabitha-dress-up…without Tabitha. I don’t know if Tabitha will be happy or sad about this.
Yeah, this page was written as though Layla found some other chance to go shopping after the truck stop, even though we never actually saw anything of the sort. Maybe there was a souvenir shop outside of the Mad Science convention?