Unfaq Vol 3

Well, it's a bit later than I had intended, but it's time for the next volume of "questions you never had in the first place."  Nothing much to ramble on about right now so lets dive right in.

Episode 6 - Literary Criticism

The T-rex on the title page is inteded to be the same one that appears in both episode 2 and 3.  There really can't be that many T-rexes just wandering around, after all.  Also, why does that one guy have a snorkel?  He just does and reappears throughout the episode (along with most of the extras on the title page.)

The computer that The Word Smith uses inside the Word Cave is a Commodore PET, with an extra cooling tower.  The text that appears on the screen is various random things from a natural language processing text book that I have - it's not just gibberish!  It just has no particular meaning when mashed all together like that.

The first exterior shot on page 4 is based off of a branch of the Waterloo Public Library.  I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one, exactly.

The whole Dielight thing (page 5) is, of course, meant to be a spoof of Twilight.  The text on the book may be a bit hard to read so here it is in full:
Dielight
- A Tale Of -
Sparkly Zombies
And Other Things
With Sparkles!

And beside the zombie:
Can't See!
Too Many
Damn Sparkles!

For the record, I'm not really a fan of zombies, I think they're kind of boring.

The reveal on page 6 where the villain of the day is actually The Pen's mother was something that just happened whilst I was working out the details of the episode 6 script (it wasn't in the overall outline.)  I don't recall why I went that route, I think it was just an idea that popped in my head whilst I was working out dialogue.  Fun-ish fact:  I briefly considered making The Word Smith The Pen's father, but decided against it.

Of course page 8 has a Sailor Moon-ish transformation sequence (with sparkles!)  I based The Author's outfit on actual 80s workout clothes (according to a google image search) and there's actually more garish/ridiculous looking stuff than what I went with.

I believe I mentioned it in the page 9 blog post/comments, but it bears repeating:  drawing crowd scenes is annoying.  Coming up with a relatively unique look for that many people can take a bit.  And me being me, things sneak in like ducks on peoples' heads.  Also, if one looks in the lower right corner of the last panel (ie, the one with the crowd scene), one may notice a couple of cameos of characters from previous episodes.

The pose that The Author gets stuck in is based on a real gymnastics pose, though I've probably not rendered it entirely correctly.  Gymnists are freakishly flexible.

And this episode also starts to hint at the overall plot of the comic (yes, there is one!)  Dun dun dun!

Whelp, that is all for this volume of the unfaq.  The script for episode 7 is basically written (minus some dialogue and editing) so I'll be looking to resume the comic in the next week or two so stay tuned!

Freak Out,
-TFitC