Comic #181: For Every Occasion (Patreon)

Originally published: March 15th, 2009.

My strongest memory of making this comic was completely erasing it a week later. To explain how that happened I need to give a little background on my comic making process.

When I start making a comic every week the first thing I do is open my template comic file. This is what my template comic file for Dark Legacy Comics looks like in 2026:

It's basically just got my basic layers already organized the way I like them, as well as a default set of panels and text.

After I open the template file, I change the name to the current comic I am working on, and I perform a "Save As" and give it the number of the current comic. Unfortunately, back in 2009, when I started working on the comic after this one, #182, I opened the template file, changed the name, did a Save As, and saved it by mistake as #181, overwriting my last comic. Obviously this didn't make a difference for the website, as the final jpg was unchanged, but my raw file with all my layers was completely lost.

At the time, I was super frustrated, because I remember thinking how hard I worked on this one, and how much detail existed in the comic that I would have been able to reuse in future comics, and this was all lost. Now I look back at this one and all I can see is how janky it looks. It's crazy, it really feels like yesterday when this happened.

It just goes to show, if you lose something you worked hard on, just work long enough that your old work looks like garbage in comparison and then you won't care anymore.

Anyway, as to the comic itself, it's probably not a shock to know that engineering is my favorite profession. It is the one profession I never got rid of over the years. There are just too many conveniences contained within the profession that I became dependant one, and could not bear to part with. On the other side of that, engineering has also been famously neglected over the years, and I wanted to make a comic about both sides of the profession.