Far Out There

What a difference a few extra lines of dialog makes! In rough draft form, this page was bugging me on several levels. For one thing, Layla shooing Trigger away came across as more of an “Awww, poor Trigger!” moment than intended. After all, teenage big sis not wanting little bro listening in on personal conversations is hardly unrealistic, but it was coming across as needlessly mean. What’s more, there wasn’t really a JOKE anywhere, just the stuff that had to happen to get us from last week’s pages to the next couple of weeks. Somehow, Layla going into detail on making Ichabod pay for long distance calls wasn’t the comedy gold I’d hoped for. And WORST of all… there was a lot of empty space in the first panel. Just unattractive bare wall. BOO.

So I threw in a little extra dialog for Tabitha, filling up the side of the panel and fixing that last one. And what do you know! It fixed the other two at the same time! Saying Layla’s actually protecting Trigger from bad influences is probably just a self-serving justification for being selfish (this IS Layla after all) But even the suggestion that she’s looking out for Trigger helps lighten the mood a bit. Better yet, now we all get to imagine just what Layla could have to talk about that weirds TABITHA out. Have fun theorizing on THAT one, kiddies!

And speaking of siblings (basically) Voting Incentive!

(Oh, and speaking of Voting Incentives, I’m gonna TRY to have a new one ready to go along with Friday’s comic before I hit the road, but I make no guarantees)

(Historical Notes: …and speaking of speaking of Voting Incentives, this ended up being one of the weirder mistakes I made posting stuff to TWC. Somehow, in the mad scramble to post the Incentive image oh Photobucket and link to it on TWC, I failed to notice that I’d actually posted THIS COMIC a second time instead of the actual incentive.  This is the sort of thing that got a LOT less common after I started posting the Incentives on their own SmackJeeves page instead of a separate image host.)