Sobriety is such a problem

As you may know, I have promised the awesome Briana for Rune Master a piece of fan art for her coming hiatus. It's the least I could do after she, y'know, built my new PHP site!

I vowed to make an informed piece of fan art, so it was archive conquering time! She's another mad producer, which means I had 665 strips to get through to formulate and produce my art... by August 1. For those of you paying attention, August 1 is in two and a half hours. IT TOOK A WHILE TO GET THROUGH THE ARCHIVES, OK!

Going though, I thought I had a good idea of what to do for her. For the first 2/3 of the story the main character, Diyero, is a drunken fool. All my ideas went after the easy funny. (He casts magic with runes... is there a rune combo that makes a glass of booze keep refilling itself?) Then, today, I went in to finish the archives.

*insert record scratch here*

He quit drinking! It's a redemption arc! Hey, good for him, BAD FOR MY IDEAS! This is why I wanted to have read everything, though - because RM is such an epic that it could go in any direction.

Now I have to figure out a new direction. Typical character portrait? A more clever gag? What if I draw her characters in *my* style, such as the pic above? Too self-absorbed? I have until midnight to get this done. I joked with Briana that it might take me until midnight Hawaii time to get it done... and boy, that might be right.

More final fantasizing

Continuing the sketches of my kids as Final Fantasy VII characters, I up the ante with this jolly twofer. Cait Sith is a cat that rides atop a big, white, cuddly puppet beast. Well, hey, Bud has a big, white and cuddly father...

I'll confess: This sketch cracks me up something fierce. I keep giggling like a moron.

How not to kill a character

Or should that be how to not kill a character?

I was going to have fun with Tiffany's choking and subsequent passing out. She goes going to collapse with a *thud* and... nothing. Life would go on, and Tiffany just wouldn't be there. Is she OK? Is she DEAD? Oh no! She'd be gone for the rest of the story! I would have gotten such a kick out of it... if only I hadn't screwed it up.

Acting like a newspaper comic guy, I treat my dailies and Sundays as operate entities - just like they do in the biz! Of course, this can come back to bite me, as the Sunday strip following Tiff's "death" featured... Tiffany! Oops.

To make matters worse, Monday's strip featured Jacob getting benched for Quincy. Of course, as a smart commenter point out, Jacob couldn't be benched unless Tiffany was OK. D'oh! We all knew she'd be fine, but that was poor plotting on my part. I couldn't even toy with the readers correctly!

Making good on my threats.

I have been a vocal support of Alone in a Crowd's Hopetail agenda for a while. (Such as with this strip.) So last night, after wrecking a few trains in my interview, I hung around the chatroom with AIaC's Tom (and Joshua of Got the Point?) and grabbed for a bit. Somewhere along the line I made a joke about putting my hair up in Hopetails while looking as gross and ugly as possible. (Rum was involved.) Well, since I've been here struggling to come up with a blog topic for today, and since Tom happened to retweet his Hopetails strip at such a moment, I decided to go through it - dignity be damned!



You know what? It's a surprisingly difficult look to pull off. At least for a dude who is unpracticed in the ways of hair artistry. My Hopetails kept sliding down my head, so THIS IS THE BEST YOU GET, TOM! My hair is now full of tangles too. Conclusion: Hopetails are dangerous in the wrong hands.

Public speaking

For those interested, this is a far-too-late reminder that I have interview with Webcomic Reviews and Interviews tonight at 8pm EST. Stop by and listen to the disaster if you'd like. If you're lazy, a podcast download should be available in the future.

Old School Gaming

Despite writing a gamer into my comic, I'm not the gamer type. In fact, I am YEARS behind the curve. Gaming for tonight: PLAYSTATION ONE GLORY! We started off with Twisted Metal 2 and now we're making our first foray into the classic Final Fantasy VII - if Jacob as Cloud wasn't enough to clue you in. Yeah, we're just a bit behind the curve here.

Repaying a debt

In order to make my snazzy new site, I required a lot of assistance. The MVP of Chrispy-helping was Briana, the awesome co-creator of Rune Master: Tales of a Demon Slayer. Do check it out!

When she could have taken my first-born child in payment, she instead requested some fan art to cover her week off in August and a review on Choice Comics. I promised I would be good to her. Then LIFE hit. (Stupid life!) Now I scramble to repay my dept in time!

In order to craft proper fan art, I must first PRACTICE the drawing of her fun characters. Enjoy the sampling of sketches today, and do check the Rune Master site soon for my finished piece.

What's cookin'?

Absolutely nothing by me! Every day I promise to cook dinner. Ever day something else comes up. Way to go, me! That's how to help out with the grandparents. Fail. Maybe tomorrow will be different! Maybe I'll make my spaghetti or stir fry! Maybe.

Also, it would help if I remember to POST my blog entry. Just saving the image to my hard drive isn't enough!

Is this guy important?

Mystery kid makes his second appearance on this blog. Is he somehow significant? No, not really. He remains merely a point of interest. HOW am I going to use him? Oh, you'll see... eventually.

So much for painting

This trip was supposed to be all about painting. Well, screw that. Let's do everything else!

My comic buffer only went until Saturday, which was fine for my initial plans of coming home, uh, tonight. Obviously, that's not happening. Instead, I'll be heading home on Sunday, which means I have to do strips here in DC. Unfortunately, DC is not the best place to make strips, so they take a bit longer to produce. Thus, painting time goes bye bye.

This was a productive evening, though! (You know it's a productive day when I have no extra sketches to show you in the daily blog.) Aside from sketching out enough strips to justify a mass inking, I also had a breakthrough with the scripting of the next storyline!

This current arc isn't getting much love, so plans to extend it have been scrapped. (I think it'll read a lot better in the archive, when you can burn through them all at once.) Baseball fun ends on the 10th, and then we launch into a special story I whipped up FOR YOU FANS! You guys reminded me that I've been neglectful about some stuff, so this is me coming back to remind you why you read Precocious in the first place.

This next story will run for four weeks, and I'm quite proud of what I have so far. 21 of the 24 scrips are done, and I know what I need to cover with the last three. Yay inspiration!

While I'm talking about the future, I'm hoping to get a bit more varied in presentation after this, going gag-a-day for a week or two between stories. I have some loose plans for the next few months, but there's lots of open space for me to drop the storytelling and go wild!

And somewhere along the line I'm doing some painting. I have commissions, darn it!