Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
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Comic strip for September 30 2023.
PANEL ONE: Thrumger and Erlak stand at the bar, with Drv'dxx visible on the other side. THRUMGER: So, you're in love with Conniff, is that right? PANEL TWO: Different angle on Thrumger and Erlak. ERLAK: Oh, hi, Thrumger. Uh... Well, I don't know that I'd say “love”; I mean, I find her attractive, of course... PANEL THREE: Close on Thrumger THRUMGER: You said “love” a minute ago. PANEL FOUR: Thrumger and Erlak face each other. ERLAK: Is there _anything_ I could say to avoid a nasty confrontation? THRUMGER: Not that I can think of. ERLAK: Mind if I keep trying?
September 30 2023

Well, regarding the hunt for those missing October strips... the good news is, it turns out the reason nothing was showing on the screen when I hooked up that old desktop computer was indeed the fault of the VGA cord; when I hooked up my monitor that had a VGA connection, it worked just fine. The bad news is, the missing files weren't there. Which wasn't particularly a surprise; I thought that was a bit of a long shot; but it was still a disappointment.

This doesn't mean those files are necessarily lost forever. There's still a good chance they're on one of the hard drives I still have from my even older computers. But I don't have any immediate way of accessing the data from those hard drives to check, so I definitely won't have them before tomorrow. Which means unfortunately that I'm going to have to resort to putting the new lettering over the old bitmap image files, since I don't have the Illustrator files to edit. Which isn't a huge issue for now; if all goes well you won't be able to tell the difference. But it will be a problem if I ever want to release a higher-resolution version of the strips, like for instance if I want to publish a print book. But if that ever happens, hopefully by then I will have managed to find those old files.

Anyway, enough about that. Let me talk about today's strip. In particular, let me talk about the horribly anatomy in that third panel, and Thrumger's weirdly narrow forearms and right shoulder. Ugh. Sorry. I am definitely no master of drawing anatomy, but I think I'm at least a little better now than I was back when I drew this strip more than two decades ago.

Also, considering there doesn't seem to be anyone to Thrumger's left, I guess that drink Drv'dxx is holding in the first panel is for Thrumger, which is odd, because he didn't ask for a drink. Maybe he has a usual that Drv'dxx just knows to bring. Or maybe there's an invisible god standing to his left. I actually don't remember what I was thinking when I drew this strip. (It almost certainly wasn't that there was an invisible god to Thrumger's left, though.)

One more thing: Yes, this is another strip with horribly crowded dialogue balloons. Sorry about that.