#after-comic update

So tonight is just one of those night's where creativity just doesn't spark. You can keep throwing ideas and effort into panels, but sometimes there are very real physical limitations. Not an excuse, but update night for After has become a hour or two short of insanity these past few weeks. Rest assured, the update schedule is going to resume as normal next week, but we plain and simple were too consumed to finish the page this week.

In order to make up for the entertainment vacuum we've left by not having an update, I figured I'd give an idea of what our past few page updates have been like. Specifically, let's look back on the making of page 17 from a few weeks ago.

9:30PM:

Katy returns from martial arts to start finalzing the sketches she had been working on. Afterward, she scans them in so that I can add dialogue. In order to make certain that this is accomplished, beer and pork dumplings must be provided:

10:00-10:30PM:

Not a lot of dialogue for this chapter, but a fair amount of noises. The most difficult one in particular involved Sarah colliding face-first with a hanging slab of meat:

10:30-11:00PM

JIm does the lettering and passes it onto Katy so that it can be added once the page is finalized.

~1:00AM

With the lettering completed, that's basically the end of my role as a writer and Jim's as a letterer. At this point, Katy gruelingly works away at the art while I work on the comic's Twitter/Blog pages, work on future scripts, or keep the constant supply of coffee going for Katy:

~2:00AM:

It's around this time that a crazy thunderstorm blasted it's way on over. Katy's dog Remy is terrified of thunder, so we spent a good chunk of time throwing blankets over him in an effort to calm him down:

3:30AM-5L00AM:

Typically we'd be finished around this time, but we ran difficulty shading the last three panels. It was around this time that Katy wasn't certain we could even finish, and I was shifting in and out of consciousness. At about 4:30, Katy shook me awake to let me know she was able to finish the page after all:

Updating the website and social media takes about twenty minutes. In the end, I was able to get about an hour of sleep before leaving for work at 6:00AM. All in all, it was a good update night, but left us pretty drained. The next few weeks were pretty similar, which has left us pretty brain-dead this week.