Far Out There

Well THIS sure took a while, didn’t it? Sorry, I’m helping with Vacation Bible School at church this week, and it’s kind of messed up my schedlue… and seeing as how 2017 has basically been the year of “Crap, What’s Happened to my Schedule?!?!?” already, you can see how that’s a problem. Fortunately, Friday’s page is actually penciled already, so HOPEFULLY that one will come out in a more reasonable time frame.

Just to make myself look more productive, though, let me remind you that a special extra Father’s Day page went up on Sunday, so there’s that at least!

Anyway, PLANS! So, there’s some well-known rules about characters explaining their plans in stories: if you hear the plan in advance, something’s gonna go wrong, but if you DON’T hear the plan, you know everything will work out. These are The Rules for a reason, since pairing the explanation/results up any other way tends to be bad from a narrative standpoint. If you tell the audience exactly what’s going to happen before it happens… well, that’s just boring and you wasted everyone’s time by feeding them information twice. And if things go wrong but you never clued the audience in on how they were SUPPOSED to go, they won’t know what to make of what’s actually happening and tune out in confusion… and then there’s me: dropping PART of the plan, but leaving enough vague that the audience hopefully won’t know what to make of things one way or the other. Because deliberately confounding the reader is ALWAYS a good idea!

Finally, today’s Voting Incentive is another rough doodle… but I don’t really think I WANT to see a detailed version of this.

(Historical Notes: So, I’m not entirely sure what happened, but the version of this page I have saved on my computer looks WAY worse than the one here.  This is actually the old SmackJeeves copy ripped directly off the Wayback Machine.  Something about that screentone gradient on this page just doesn’t come out the the same way it does here, and I really can’t figure out why.  That’s one of the reasons I’ve largely given up using screentones, they’re waaay to unpredictable when you start changing the size of the image.)