Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
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Comic strip for October 1 2023.
PANEL ONE: Close on Erlak's champion in a forest. CHAMPION: There's always a new frontier to explore, a new discovery to be made... an adventurer's life never ends. PANEL TWO: Slightly wider shot; we see the champion riding on Nezhoni the giant rat. NEZHONI: Actually, from what I've heard, an adventurer's life tends to end somewhat earlier than the average person's... CHAMPION: Oh, shut up. PANEL THREE: Close on the champion. CHAMPION: You know, adventurers are called upon to perform all manner of dangerous and unusual tasks... PANEL FOUR: In a tavern, a standing woman addresses a seated man. CAPTION: They have to deal with the deadliest and most devious of traps... WOMAN: Notch, does this dress make me look less fat than the blue one? MAN: Um... PANEL FIVE: A young man dressed only in a tower stands in front of an older man with his hand on his forehead in frustration. CAPTION: ...Breach all manner of barrier... YOUNG MAN: Um... I kind of locked myself out of my room again... PANEL SIX: In a tavern room, a trio of travelers sit at a table. CAPTION: Solve puzzles and answer riddles... TRAVELER ONE: Okay, so that's thirty-one florins seven pence, plus tip, divided by three... TRAVELER TWO: I only have a twenty-florin coin. TRAVELER THREE: Why do they call them waiters when we're usually the ones waiting for them? PANEL SEVEN: A woman reaches under a cabinet. CAPTION: They explore the darkest and most unpleasant of places... OFFSCREEN VOICE: Yes, I'm sure I saw it roll there. Keep looking. WOMAN: When's the last time you cleaned out under the cabinet, anyway? PANEL EIGHT: The adventurer from the first comic sits at a table across from a young boy. CAPTION: ...And try to reason with the most unreasonable of creatures... ADVENTURER: If you don't eat all your vegetables, you'll never grow big. BOY: Cool! PANEL NINE: The champion stands beside Nezhoni the giant rat, holding a yellow-stained rag. CHAMPION: ...But I don't think cleaning out a giant rat's earwax is part of the job description! NEZHONI: It is unless you feel like walking to Reeland.
October 1 2023

Huh, so apparently in the last panel of the second row of this comic I established the currency of at least one country in the world of Soup, which I've got to be honest I completely forgot about and probably would have contradicted if the matter ever came up again (although I guess it could have been justified by assuming the later strip took place in a different country with different currency.

This strip, by the way, also served the purpose of providing some foreshadowing, by showing a few characters who I had plans for later in the strip (and also showing one character who appeared once before, and who I intended to bring back later...)

Hm, sorry for the low image quality and weird pixelation artifacts. This is, alas, the first strip for which I'd lost the original Adobe Illustrator files and for which I only have the exported bitmap files... and unfortunately the bitmap file in question is, well, like this. When I first started the comic I saved all the strips as gifs before later switching to png files, and I think what must have happened in this case is that I had first saved it as a gif file, and then resaved the gif as a png rather than newly exporting a png from the original Illustrator file. Anyway, when and if I do locate those old missing Illustrator files (which, again, may very well be on one of the several old hard drives I still have but currently have no way of reading data from), I'll be sure to replace this strip with a higher-quality version.