A new strip up on the Flickr page.

 


The first Jet Starr for a couple of weeks. (I must get round to finishing the football saga. There's only one more page to draw but two or three more pages to letter and ink in Photoshop.)

I drew today's page when I was in Sheffield visiting the in-laws a couple of months ago, and then it sat for a long time doing nothing because I quite liked the pencils I had done.

My least favourite bit of drawing my comics is the inking. I'm not a natural inker. Of all the stages involved in getting from a stupid scribble to a strip that I can put up on the web, and walk away from, inking is the one that brings most disappointment. I like writing the jokes, which I usually do as I'm drawing rough thumbnails so I pretty much know what is going where as I write, and the pencilling is just the best bit - but inking to me is often a joyless chore. This page of spacebabe/squidulon wrestling sat on my drawing board for a week waiting for me to have the courage to ruin my pencils. Then I had an inspiration. I inked the girl's tits in the first two panels. Then I had to do the rest of those panels so it didn't look like I was even more of a perv than Merriol thinks I am already. And then I had to do the rest of the page because it would have looked silly otherwise.

The other thing that held me back was I couldn't get the punchline quite right. As I was shading it tonight in Photoshop I threw out the original line and found this one.

I'm a bit chuffed with it. In a week I'll think it's awful.

As usual.