page 887 – Highly Difficult Maneuvers
Another late, half-finished page? Yeah, and it comes with another unexpected excuse. See, on Christmas, SmackJeeves unleashed their LOOONG promised new site design. Among other things, it features bigger cover pages for all the comics instead of those little rectangle title banners… which, despite MONTHS of heads ups, I never got around to drawing before the new design went live. Any comic without a title page can’t show up on the SJ main page when it updates, or in recommendations, and I think it won’t turn up on searches either, so I kinda had to get that taken care of QUICK. Well, I managed to get at least some temporary covers up for Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom (the main comics anyway, still working on the Incentive/Patreon galleries), but that extra work sort of ate into the time for this page… which I was ALREADY running late on due to how late TUESDAY’S page was. As a result, I don’t have a new Voting Incentive up yet either. There’ll be one by tomorrow, though, presumably when the colored in version of the comic is posted. Sorry for all the delays! I’ll be back in a normal groove soon!
Oh, and it didn’t help that this page was deceptively hard to write. I mean, it all boils down to a joke about groping. That took many, many, MANY rewrites to achieve a sufficient level of wide-eyed innocence for that not to come off as creepy. At least, I HOPE it doesn’t come off as creepy.
(Historical Notes: I can’t remember how much of that last bit was genuine and how much was Past Me trying to throw off people’s expectations before The Big Twist in a few pages. When I get too sleep deprived, I get irrational in ways that look VERY unfamiliar to me later on. Also, man, to thing there was a time when SmackJeeves actually communicated with its users and gave them a meaningful heads-up before changing things.)
Some additional advice to be a Hugmaster that Trigger can provide: Be adorable, cuddly, friendly, and an all-round (non-literal) cinnamon bun of a person (with the non-literal in there due to talking to a Mad Scientist, and one of them might make a LITERAL Cinnamon Bun Person simply to experiment hugging with).
The paradox, of course, being that the second anyone deliberate TRIES to be what Trigger is by accident, they’ve already failed. It’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Cuteness.