One of the cool things about XCOM: Enemy Unknown is that it makes no difference between its male and female troopers. Admittedly, gender isn’t one of the things you can customise your XCOM soldiers for, but while it means you can’t choose an all-female corps, you can’t choose an all-male one either.

I like games that do this; others that come to mind are Halo: Reach (where your avatar, Noble Six, had male and female options for voice and body) and, of course, the Mass Effect trilogy, which, some argue, presented a stronger female Commander Shepard than the male version.

No doubt you’ve noticed that this strip is missing the digital inking of the last two. As inking with a mouse can take forever, I decided to see whether a straight scan of the original pencil sketch (adjusted to try and bring out the pencils more) would work as it is. I don’t mind the resut at all, but I’m half wondering whether physical inking with an Artline pen would work…

One thing I am having trouble with, though, is figuring out how to get GIMP to morph fonts so I can put things on angles (like having the “SHAAA!” actually run along the path of Alpha’s shot) or bend words around curves. According to the GIMP user manual you can, but it’s vague on how, and when I’ve tried it, it’s not worked properly.