page 1227 – Earlier, at the same time…
Oh man, it feels weird to talk about the past week as being a “break,” since I’ve technically cranked out over a dozen comics over the past seven days, but it was still a MASSIVE load off my mind to already have this page finished and ready to post. It felt AMAZING to not have to scramble to get caught up on anything over the weekend… even if I did just use that extra time to bash out even more Conventional Wisdom stuff. I really need to hunker down and get a page buffer built up more often. Granted, this comic is pretty obviously one of those “single panel filler page that can be finished in no time” deals that can wear out their welcome very quickly, but I feel like I’ve been pretty good about actually advancing plot stuff lately, so hopefully this won’t feel TOO much like wheel spinning. Besides, everybody on this page probably needed a quick “We’re here too!” appearance just to keep them all in play. That’s yet another thing that’s harder to stay on top of while only doing one page a week.
But speaking of doing stuff over the week, continue keeping an eye out for more TWC Voting Incentives! The last one was a pretty drastic change of pace, so who KNOWS how the next one will turn out? Seriously, I have no idea what it’ll be until right before I start drawing. Your guess is as good as mine.
EDIT: Huh. As it turns out, this week’s incentive ended up being a nice sort of middle ground between the styles of the previous ones, and I didn’t even mean for that to happen.
Mariska, you end up in situations where you jump head-first into trouble due to your own actions making things more complicated. Ichabod just seems to stumble across troublesome situations and individuals. Basically, you create your own trouble, while Ichabod stubs his toes on it. As such, your situations are always messier than his, particularly since you always have a stake in the outcome.
…but the REAL danger is the kind of trouble these two get into when they’re traveling together and feeding off of each other.
Ichabod stubs his toe on the outer edge of a minor disaster, only for Mariska to pull him and everyone else into the middle of the disaster, where Ichabod discovers something that can enflame the disaster worse and informs Mariska, only for Mariska to reveal it to the worst possible people to inform, effectively producing a result that’s between twice to five times worse than what would have been produced by either of them being involved. I’m also ignoring the side-quests and minor distractions that effectively throw oil onto the disaster, both before and after it’s “enflamed”, or the two subtly teasing each other resulting in them both being worse than normal.