Joyce and Walky!

See?  Look how much more room my characters have to ramble when I use a typeface in my comics.  Hell, I’m not sure that before this anyone really got to ramble at all.  This is a strip that probably would have had to have been a Sunday before just to fit all the words in.

Also new: Now that I wasn’t writing and drawing at the same time, as the dialogue was now being added later, I started writing out dialogue scripts ahead of drawing the panels.  This involved completely relearning how I write cartoons.  It’s very hard for me to unmarry the art and dialogue, since I’m usually doing them simultaneously.  But through sheer force of will, I learned to create strips differently from how my brain had been doing so for… nearly 5 years at this point?  For the first time, strips began in a notepad file.

This didn’t last very long — maybe a few months, I don’t recall.  Eventually I started creating comics art first and then adding dialogue later.  Essentially the old Marvel style, where Stan Lee came up with some very loose ideas, his artist would essentially write the story in illustration form, and then Stan Lee would go back in and add the actual finished dialogue — except I was both dudes.  I did comics this way until, like, 2012.

Now, with my Cintiq, I’m able to create strips essentially the same way I did originally back in Roomies!, writing and drawing simultaneously, panel by panel.

oh and also it looks like i’ve quit using markers in favor of 100% computer shading

that probably saved me a fortune

those prismacolor markers are hella spensive