It’s the return of fanart! OMFG! Here’s Billie, uncharacteristically happy, as portrayed by Pembroke of Femmegasm. See, she’s got beers! And Uggs! What more could a girl want?
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New England Webcomics Weekend, the best thing ever in the whole damn world, is this Saturday and Sunday in Easthampton, Massachusetts! I am serious, it is like eating chocolate while having sex on top of an airplane that Indiana Jones is piloting. I get a boner just thinking about Webcomics Weekend.
There’s also a neat Pub Crawl the Friday night before that I recommend. It is booze + webcartoonists + strangers.
I’ll of course have my stuff with me, the books and posters and hats and what not. But those are always second to the Experience. Every webcartoonist you’ve ever heard of will be there. And we’ll all be high-fiving. Constantly. Oh my god.
(NEWW will be the first place you’ll be able to get your hands on the Dina Dino Hat. I’m trying to make up as many as I can before this weekend so I have a bunch to sell! I will make some for after the con, of course, but the con is the priority.)
Sal was the third character I redesigned for Dumbing of Age. Joyce and Sarah were pretty easy. They were both college students 13 years ago, so reworking them was just a menial wardrobe update. But Sal, in her other life, was a alien-fighting superhero. Dumbing of Age was a fresh start that had no aliens, which presented a conundrum for Sal. What is Sal like in a world where she doesn’t have the tragic focal point that made her who she is, while still keeping her quintessentially Sal?
In Roomies! and It’s Walky!, Sal probably had the biggest variety of “outfits.” She went through a lot of visual evolutions. So I pulled from some of them, grabbing her jacket and her midriff shirt and her gloves, and, trying to create a “motorcycle girl” motif, I drew a homeless man.
My wife, Maggie, was all, “Dude, what the fuck. That’s awful.” This went on for some time. And she was right, of course. She helped me as we looked through Google Images of actual motorcycle-riding outfits. She told me what had to be done. And I did it. Sal is Maggie’s creation. She’s our little baby that we made together, and just like real babies, the wife did all of the actual work.
I knew there was some reason I married her!
So sometimes I spend a whole lotta time drawing backgrounds, only for them to get covered up almost entirely by characters. I mean, I know what parts are gonna get covered up, since I blue-pencil everything down before starting to ink, but I try to draw the complete background anyway, on its own layer. Hey, y’never know when I’ll be able to use it again! (Or use it to make a blog post.) And it’s much easier to reuse backgrounds if you don’t have to fill in people-shaped holes with the edges of trees or windows or whatever.
Regardless, this is what it looks behind our heroes in today’s strip. There’s four people standing in a row in most of the wide shots, so of course you can’t see much of it! But here it is for posterity.
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