NOTE: I'm planning to take this Friday (the 22nd) off from the story comic due in part to pseudo-holiday "we know Thanksgiving is next week, but this is when it worked for us to get together" reasons. There's also a "I'm feeling a bit burned out" reason, but mostly the holiday thing. EGSNP should be up as normal.

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That's supposed to be Latin for "hair change", basically. I'm not trained in Latin, and neither is Tedd, so it's okay if mistakes are made, but she and I are both trying to do an okay job of it.

Unless we wind up doing too well, because at least one of the spells has gotta have a mistake in it. These are SUPPOSED to be amateurish uses of Latin, darn it, so we'd best mess up somewhere, or we're going to have to mess something up on purpose, and for all I know we'll get it right by mistake if we try that.

Behind the Scenes Bouncing Around

From a behind the scenes perspective, this page is significant. This is the page in which, part way through, I realized the approach I was taking to making comics was terrible for me.

For years, I've gone with the strategy of sketching an entire comic, then inking that entire comic, then shading that entire comic, etc. Well, first I did the writing and planned the layout, but the point is that each stage was finished for the whole comic before moving on to the next.

Recently, when thinking through how my mind works, I thought I was on to a good thing by prioritizing sketching of as much as I could for multiple comics on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and finishing comics on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. This was an improvement, but not much of one.

Then, while working on this comic, I was listening to an explanation of gameplay loops in video games, and I realized that if my comic making was a video game, the loop would be an absolute failure. It would be doing one thing for hours, then another thing for hours, and so on. It's not a well paced experience.

Now, making comics is not a video game, but know what can really hold my focus and attention? Video games with good gameplay loops. Little known fact that will shock everyone in the universe, but I can play games like Fallout 4 for hours, and a big part of that is a cycle of gameplay in which you may do the same things over and over, but it's a variety of things, and you take breaks between things by doing other things.

Getting to the point, I didn't sketch this whole page before doing any inking. In fact, I completely finished the last two panels before I'd sketched the middle two. I completed Tedd in panel one and the whole of panel four before there was anything but text in panel three, and then I did all of panel three before going back and finishing the first two panels. 

There are certain risks in such an approach, such as not catching a mistake in a panel you decided to finish that you might have caught if you sketched it all first, but it was such a better experience for me. Heck, aside from being easier to focus, just the fact that I could see panels being done as I went was a morale boost.

Long story short, I'm pretty excited by the thought of making future comics in a less linear fashion.

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- EGSNP