Whenever I want to get real simple with the colors, I always end up trying something new or just spending way too much time on it. I wasn’t going to color this strip at all at first, but it didn’t sit well. It’s not really drawn for black and white, it needs color. I didn’t want to go grayscale so I tried out SinTitulo’s coloring style which I really liked. The panels aren’t set up very well for it, so there are some blending issues, but overall I like this palette. I gave the balloon outlines a brown color aswell so they wouldn’t demand too much attention over the art itself.

Concerning the storyline, I have no idea where it came from. I was going for something else before (and struggling with it) when this popped in my head. It was probably a combination of good weather, lingering story ideas from Ted’s Caving Page and The Mothman Prophecies, and listening to too much A Fine Frenzy.

Tom meets Alex, one of the 3 new regular castmembers.
It took me a while to get this comic done. Usually I come up with an idea, play around with it a bit, maybe sketch it out, and then often I largely restructure it to perfect the flow or punchline, and that’s the final comic. This one it just didn’t feel 100% right in the end, but I had to make it to introduce Alex, so I just tweaked it a lot until I was happy with it.