The spirit of giving

You say the holidays are gone? Well, they are. The holidays are dead and rotting in the ground. Chrispianity will dance on their graves!

This post actually has little to do with equinox-inspired generosity, but themes include compassion, giving, cold weather and an impulsively drawn halo. The topic had to be addressed.

I am still working on building up a nice buffer for Precocious. If I have an epic inking weekend, it's not out of the question that I could end up a month ahead of schedule. (Chances are I'll only be three weeks ahead, but that's still damn good!)

Since I had only loosely planned which story lines would be coming up, I didn't have a firm grip on the numbers of already-scripted strips I had. The next two weeks will cover Max's birthday shenanigans. After that, the goal was to do some random, one-off strips to focus on my visual gag/regular gag writing skills. If not that, then I was going to do the story about the dessert brawl.

Today, I finally picked my direction. What did it? I had already uploaded a one-off gag strip tentatively set as #31, which would make it the Monday strip after the Max stuff. The dessert set turned out to be six strips, which is a week's compliment. Ok, then! I'm too lazy to spend two seconds changing the number, so gag week it is!

I already had two written, and I figured I would try to craft strips around potential t-shirt designs. (It's not soulless if they're funny.) The gag strips are needed because they allow me to show off all characters of Precocious. Not all arcs involve anyone, so new readers might go a month without seeing, say, Roddy. Roddy's proposed t-shirt design (posted here months back - look it up yourselves!) is more of the natural conclusion to several Roddy plots. This is something that four panels alone can't convey.

THE GOAL HAS SHIFTED: Get Roddy some air time! His big debut was supposed to be the class president storyline, but we are now post-inauguration and my time-warp strips will seem even more hopelessly dated. Checking my "Precocious story lines" document, the strip is going to focus on the home lives of the kids soon. In the middle of it all is a placeholder line, reminding me that I need a Roddy storyline to keep him in the minds of the readers. That time is now!

I'm happy with the new batch of strips. Not only did I get to involve Roddy, I established HOW Roddy is able to break into the lives of my insular children. Even better, the strips are seasonally appropriate! By producing these strips, I am officially tossing aside the "Autumn is the new girl" crutch and moving into the strip's regular, time-appropriate rhythm!*

Granted, these four strips are not marvelous. The artwork took a MAJOR step back, as I am still really weak at arranging a bunch of character in one tiny panel. Also, the ending was a little, uh, table-turny. Oh well, they served their purpose.

*If I can build a month buffer, I am using that to do the second "prequel" arc for mass-uploading to the archive - but that is a bonus and not the regular strip. Oh, and the "spring project" arc will briefly draw upon Autumn as a n00b, but I'm not even certain I'll produce it at this point.