Comic #171: Pencil and Paper (Patreon)

Originally Published January 4th 2009.

This was my first hand drawn vacation comic. I ended up doing this a few times in the early days. This was very soon after my wife and I started dating. She was going off to do her masters degree in Ireland, so during that first year and a half I had multiple trips up there. It became a bit of a tradition that I would draw one comic on the road, and it would usually break the fourth wall as it did here.

I wonder if I still have the original drawing somewhere. I have no idea where it would even be, it's been so long. This was also before the ubiquity of smartphones, or good phone cameras, or photos on the cloud, so this was taken with some dinky digital camera. I had to scour the files on my external hard drive to see if I could find the original image, and sure enough, I found a couple pictures dated January 3rd. I took one with my hand, obviously necessary for the punchline, but I also found another one I had taken first, without my hand:

I wish it had a bit more detail but unfortunately those post-film pre-phone digital cameras really weren't that great.