Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
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Comic strip for December 2 2023.
PANEL ONE: Erlak walks through the Mountains of the Gods with Tagaidin and Doba. ERLAK: Look, we're not going to be going anywhere TOO dangerous, right? I mean, not with your sister the Goddess of Innocence along and all... PANEL TWO: Close on Erlak and Tagadin in profile. TAGAIDIN: Don't worry; she can take care of herself better than you'd think. Besides, the two of us will be in front, so if we're attacked we'll absorb the brunt of the damage. ERLAK: Oh... great... PANEL THREE: Overhead view of the three gods. TAGAIDIN: You know, on second thought, maybe it's best if you stay in the back... ERLAK: A part of me is mildly offended by your assumption that I'm the one who most needs to be protected... but I have to say mostly I'm grateful for your consideration of my safety... PANEL FOUR: Close on Tagaidin and Erlak from the front. TAGAIDIN: After all, there's a fairly good chance we may be attacked from behind... ERLAK: I think I'll just shut up now.
December 2 2023

Linework, linework everywhere and not a drop of space.

Seriously, was I allergic to blank areas? Why did I feel the need to fill the entire panels with busy details? It just makes the strip look busy and hides the important elements (the characters, mostly) among all the unimportant lines in the background. I guess it wouldn't be so bad if I varied the line thickness or darkness, but, with the exception of the thicker outlines around the characters (which maybe help some, but not really enough), I didn't. I think I did get better about this later. But maybe I didn't. We'll see.

Also! This was a particularly difficult strip to get the relettered dialogue to fit in the balloons. Between the revised version of the font not having exactly the same width and spacing, and the dialogue originally impinging way too closely on the edges of the balloons, I had to do quite a bit of cheating tweaking the font size and tracking. Meh. Well, eventually I'll finally get to the point where I'm drawing new strips instead of relettering old ones and then that won't be an issue (but then finding the time to draw all those new strips will of course be an issue... but one I'll deal with when the time comes).

(I could have redrawn and enlarged the dialogue balloons, of course, but again aside from the lettering I'm trying to change these old strips as little as possible, and besides that would involve covering up some of that excessive linework...)