Sunday, August 6, 2017

If you could make your hair do that you would too




Yes, the comic is one week late this week. I probably need to push myself harder.

I have a story about that, actually. How I hurt my back rediscovering the thrill of life:

I've been walking the forest trail next to my house at night for a while. Trying to make it a regular thing, for the exercise. It's two kilometers of twisting dirt path, covered in pine needles. No sign of human life if you go there at 2 AM. I find it pleasant. This night, some ten days ago, I decided to take my exercise to the next level: Light jogging. After ten minutes of breathing hard I saw the first sunlight hit the crowns of the trees and felt fine, except my legs were burning with the effort of holding my speed back to the minimum I judged I could handle to keep it up through the whole trail. So I went faster.

Before I really thought about what I was doing, I was running as fast as I physically could, desperately mindful of the ground right in front of me to place my bare feet away from roots and pinecones. I was keenly aware of how easily I could seriously hurt myself - one time I have found broken glass on the path, and since I went over 110 kilos I have felt I could as easily break my ankles as twist them. And I was able to find some kind of steel under all this fat. Steel that once upon a time let me walk a slack rope five meters over the ground, let me sit down and untangle my foot when caught under water and out of breath, let me make decisions faster than I could think at times when I had to save life and limb.

I had almost forgotten how easy it is to be in this state of genuine fear. Everything's so clear, everything fits together. The faster I move, the better. You can see how one could get addicted to it. I now have to weigh my motivation to get in shape against my fear of addiction.

But anyway, then I couldn't sit straight for the rest of the week.

So, notes on the comic:

*Anna Regn's hair has probably grown more than can be justified by moving the air around it to give it volume. I just like drawing it.

*The twins tend to stand in this order: Leon left, Anna Regn right. They started doing it just to keep people from mixing them up, but there's probably some symbolic significance in the particular order they choose. 

*The existential conflict between the lasting and the ephemeral is probably not going to cause as much drama as it could, despite the twins's fundamental difference in artistic doctrine. 

*Anna Regn clearly can't help herself from pointing fingers at the camera at the slightest provocation. Stop it. Nobody likes a foreshorteninger. 

*I still don't have a real model for how these characters should look. In fact I don't even know how their noses work. But at least I have a vague system for word balloon shapes to convey voice. And those faces in panel 8 are p. great. If I may say so myself.

*Leon's on like four or five levels of irony when she quotes Monica Geller's catchphrase "I know!" Kids watch old TV shows in different ways than we did. But I mention this just so you can hear it in that voice.

PS. It's come to my attention the comic may appear shrunk on some monitors. This raises several questions, and having done everything I can to answer them my conclusion is: I miss having websites that would only put code in your pages if you wrote that code, and if you're not seeing 1000 pixels wide comics try clicking on the image. (This should take you to imgur, where you have to click the image again to see it in full size.) (Sigh.)


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