Comic #204: Imprisonment (Patreon)

Originally published: September 6th, 2009.

Krom is reading, "Are Prisons Obsolete", which was an actual book by Angela Davis that I must have read around this time. I found it would be a fun irony to have Krom reading that book while in jail, and it had the added benefit that you wouldn't need to know about the actual book for the joke to work. Clearly I was worried people wouldn't see the little joke and had him nicely place the book hanging off the bench in the final panel to make it easier to read.

The one thing I remember about drawing this comic is how annoying I found drawing striped clothing. Back in 2009 I still found most drawing immensely difficult and time-consuming, especially if I was drawing something from scratch, so I would avoid that like the plague, and would rely on copy-pasting my earlier panels and slightly changing an arm or a facial expression here or there. I mean, just look at the wolf in panels 3 and 4 as an example. Even the rabbit in panel 4 is just the rabbit in panel 2 turned upside-down and given Xs for eyes.

The problem with striped clothing is that you can't as easily change a character's position without having to erase and redraw the stripes. I also remember struggling with retaining continuity in the stripes between panels. For example, I had to make sure his sleeves had the same number of stripes each time, and that his shoulder would have a dark stripe and the end of his sleeve a white stripe.

This is also a reason why I generally avoided characters in full armor. For example, the guard here, dora, showed up in her full armor very seldomly, and rarely changed positions much. I found it such a pain to draw. Eventually I found some tricks and ways to simplify the drawings.