So here it is! A little more Slamdance. I’m back to the old digital inking, mainly as I was partway through this one before I started on the XCOM strips.

Lessons Learned for Next Time

• Shrink the comic down to publish size before doing lots of fiddly stuff. The Bitter Pill website originally had a heap of text on it – articles, a Twitter feed – but a GIMP crash took all of it away. It happened twice before I realised that doing text work on a 6000 x 4000 pixel image is not a good idea.
• I have an allergy to plot; whenever I try it, I lose interest in creating more comics (I wrote about it in my recent guest post over on Cordelia Calls It Quits). I think I’ll stick to the odd chunks of dialogue that occur to me whenever I think about the characters and their situations.
• I’m not sure whether I’ll continue with digital inking; I like the look, but inking with a mouse really is a royal pain. The next Slamdance strip will most likely be in the same hand-inked-then-scanned style as last week’s Riverstone Road strip. Then again, maybe I just need to get a sliding shelf into my desk…

Awesome Things I Can’t Wait To Try Again

• I am really, really proud of how frame #3 came out, especially the Bitter Pill’s hand grasping the wire cutters. It’s hard to see underneath the text bubble – I might have to publish a separate pic.
• You know, much as I hate plot, I created a bunch of decent-looking strips while in its sequential mindset. I think I’ll get those ones up and done before I move on to other Slamdance stuff.