Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
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Comic strip for October 10 2023.
PANEL ONE: The champion rides Nezhoni through an open gateway, with spikes at the top that look like teeth. CHAMPION: We've got to be careful... there are probably traps everywhere. PANEL TWO: The champion rides Nezhoni through a courtyard with s skull pattern on the pavement, past a fountain with a demonic statue in the middle. CHAMPION: Any loose flagstone, any superfluous bit of decor, is potentially a trigger to some deadly pitfall. PANEL THREE: Close on the champion. CHAMPION: So we've got to be careful where we step, and stay alert, because the slightest detail could be... PANEL FOUR: The champion and Nezhoni are surrounded by figures in dark cloaks. NEZHONI: I think you're giving these guys _waaaaay_ too much credit for subtlety.
October 10 2023

That skull pattern on the pavement in the first two panels (oh, and I guess in the fourth, too, though not much of it is visible there) was not meticulously drawn by hand. I just drew one "tile" converted it into a pattern in Adobe Illustrator, filled the pavement shapes with it, and then used the perspective tool to put it, well, in perspective.

Was this a waste of time for a pattern that would only appear in one strip? Eh... I don't think so; making a pattern in Adobe Illustrator is pretty quick, and it's certainly a lot faster than drawing that all out manually. (And, come to think of it, this isn't the first time I've made a pattern that I've only used in a single strip—I made one for the wallpaper in the penultimate panel of the October 1 strip, too, and there may be other instances I'm not thinking of right now.) No, what was wrong with this wasn't that it was a waste of time, but that I did such a poor job with the perspective. I think I should have compressed it more vertically, perhaps; I'm not 100% that's the problem, but I am 100% sure there is a problem, and it shouldn't look like it does.

Oh... and, of course, I'm back from 24 Hour Comics Day. Got back yesterday morning, in fact, but spent most of yesterday sleeping. (I'd got a flight back early Monday morning rather than Sunday afternoon because it was $150 cheaper, and I figured I could sleep in the airport, but that... turned out to be harder than I thought. So when I finally got back Monday morning after going two full days with little or no sleep (I think I may have managed to nod off briefly in the airport, but I'm not sure, and if so it certainly wasn't for long), I wasn't in condition to do much other than go to bed. (Which means, unfortunately, I didn't get this commentary up until the early afternoon; I'd put up everything for all the strips through Monday before I left, but I thought I'd get a chance to put up the text for the Tuesday strip before today. I guess I'd underestimated just how tired I'd be on Monday. I guess I could have—and probably should have—done it in the airport—it's not like I didn't have a lot of time there—but, eh, even then I was tired enough it was hard for me to motivate myself to get much done. I'm still tired now, in fact, and could probably have done with another few hours of sleep, but I did have a studio teaching job today I had to get to.)

So, anyway, I did, once again, get a 24-hour comic done this year. I haven't scanned it yet; I'll do that tonight, though I may not actually have it up at d24comic.com until tomorrow. (I can't just upload the scanned images directly—or I can, but it would look awful—; I have to remove the blue sketch lines and resize them, and that takes... not all that long, but a nontrivial amount of time.) But I can tell you the title now: it's called "Passing in the Night". Which doesn't tell you much about the comic, and in fact isn't really a very good title, but I realized I was spending way too much time trying to come up with a title and needed to just decide on one, even if I wasn't totally happy with it, and move on to drawing the strip. Anyway, it's about a giant space monster.