You all know that I don’t like to express anything but bitterness and gall about my own work, but I am pretty happy with the way this turned out, with Krys dynamically breaking the boundary of the gutters and with the artsy gothy experimentation with focus in the last and third-to-last panels.

This is the final Mandrake of the storyline and Tuesday’s “Lance and Eskimo” will be the last comic in “Lance and Eskimo Fall in Love.” A sketch will follow on Thursday and then I am going on hiatus for the rest of the month. To ease the pain of separation, I have finally provided you with the scans and commentary on the original sketchbook/9th grade/raw material editions of “Greatest Lance and Eskimo On Earth and “My Fair Lance and Eskimo”.

(more…)

This strip would do just as well if not better before the previous one, but I actually didn’t write it until Tuesday, when the previous strip had already gone up. It was a last-minute addition to the lineup in order to preserve the weekday fidelity of L&E vs Mandrake. So if it seems like filler, now you know why.

(more…)

Oh dear.

I’ve honestly been working on this comic all day. Sure, there have been breaks to do work-work and run around the block, but basically it’s been me, a fresh set of weekly NPR podcasts, a new boxed set of “My So-Called Life” and this comic for my entire life to date. I guess it is a pretty long one, even without the gratuitous cheesecake diagram of fully clothed Lance.

I scripted this one way early on. In my old script notebook it comes chronologically between “Wow, they really went all out for this pirate convention” and “My love is like a red, red, red rose.” Mostly I come up with the overarching storylines ahead of time and the day-by-day scripts in a batch or two toward the beginning of that storyline, but this one came to me very quickly after I knew I was going to be using Henry Higgins and Carole Pickering… probably because most of it had already been written a hundred years earlier by George Bernard Shaw (except for the part written by George Lucas). Nowadays I keep my scripts in my email drafts, so maybe once I delete this one, gmail will stop giving me ads for Yoda costumes.

In the final panel, Lance and Eskimo are hanging out at Jeria’s–hence the couch and TV and cups and soda and magazines and toy snakes, things they don’t have down in the basement. I guess Lance is watching Robbie. It’s nighttime (Krys and Phil have already starting painting the town), so she must have already gone to bed. I suppose Lance doesn’t expect Carole until late. Eskimo doesn’t like babysitting but she doesn’t mind keeping Lance company in a nice house, especially if she needs to get her mind off of waiting.

I agonized a bit about which show Eskimo would want to watch that Lance wouldn’t. Originally it was “Lazy Town,” a show that original L&E co-developer Alison enjoys much more than I do, but that didn’t air in the U.S. until 2004. “Saddle Club” debuted in 2001, the current in-comic year. Probably Eskimo admires equestriennes.

(more…)

Waugh! Plotline crossover!

Drew this during an NPR Hearing Voices special on fatherhood. The best part was Jay Allison’s piece about the questions his daughter asked about his new girlfriend, concluding with, “If she makes you happy, I can’t hate her. I can still egg her car, though.”

Characters page is now up to date, I think.

(more…)

I have visceral memories of inking this during “Car Talk” and “Fresh Air,” probably because I do all my inking during NPR shows these days, and because I finished it earlier today.

Does it seem self-congratulatory that they always choose to leave in the audio of the callers/speakers thanking each other at the end of each segment? I understand when it’s a call-in show and it’s just the end of the call, “Thanks guys!” “No problem!” but every one of Terry Gross’s interviews without fail ends with her thanking the interviewee for being on the show followed by the interviewee (whoever they are)’s alarmingly heartfelt and fervent thanks for letting them be on the show, and answer her questions, and just generally be close to her. I think she has a love potion.

(more…)