Far Out There

Okay, we’re back on the regular update schedule… by which I mean not getting the page done until the day is nearly over. You know, the usual. As you can see, I took those extra free days I SAID I’d spend on getting a buffer of extra pages drawn and instead spent it all trying another attempt at that space lightning effect that didn’t work out before. This turned out a LOT better than the previous version, what with the fact that there’s an actual BACKGROUND this time. I’m still struggling a bit with just how much color I can squeeze into a GIF and still have it both look the way I intended it to and also come in under SmackJeeves file size limit. Don’t expect old doomsday space cloud out there to move again any time soon, I’ll probably be sticking to static images where I can REALLY go for broke on the lighting. I wound up making twice as many frames as what you’re seeing here, and there’s some WILD lightning craziness that just wasn’t surviving the GIFining process. You just wait and see! Yeah, this was a fun one to play around with.

I didn’t spend the ENTIRE weekend just recklessly coloring lightning bolts, though. Anyone who checked in since Sunday already knows a completely unannounced Mother’s Day page slipped through during all this update craziness. Also, in what can only be described as my latest manic upswing, I started to type up a new blog post for Patreon and, somehow, found myself working on, like, three separate ones at the same time. Of course, this meant none of them actually got DONE in time for this update, but one of them is so close, I think it’ll be online in the next day or so. And actually, that one’s general interest enough that I’ll be making available to all audiences. So even if you aren’t donating anything yet, go check out my Patreon in the next day or two and see what I’m rambling about this time (and for those of you who ARE donating, more exclusive material will be coming just for you shortly after)

Finally, get yourself over to Top WebComics and vote because the crossover with Becky & Gilb is almost over! You don’t wanna miss the ending of this historic meeting of two of the world’s most popular and successful webcomics, do you? DO YOU?

(Historical Notes: Well, it took a while, but at long last the world gets to see this page as originally intended with all of its frames and colors intact.  I can’t do much to de-simplify the art, obviously, but at least the space effects look a lot nicer.  That is, the individual images look a lot nicer; even after the missing frames have been added back, the jump between frames is still kind of jerky and abrupt since I kept losing track of what I’d put where from image to image.  That big, extra close bolt in particular seems to come right out of nowhere.  I should have made a frame specifically to have a lot of little bolts of lighting up in the top half of the frame, so that the next frame would look like one of them kept going and got closer.  Gee, it’s almost as if animation is an entirely different and altogether more complicated discipline than cartooning!)