Week 225! (Again! Ignore if you already saw it) (Patreon)

This is also a repost of an update that had already went up, in order to have all Patrons included. The previous post has been deleted (and thus won't charge anyone for it), and this one charges for the week in its place, so everything's fine and there's nothing for you guys to worry about concerning your pledges. Anyway...

Euch, day late, but oh well. Page 416, all done.

Actually a decent amount of tweaks and redrawing done (largely concerning Kale) between the lineart version I put up earlier and this finalized version, which doesn't normally happen really. His head was too big or too small, his chin/cheeks/jaw wasn't the right shape, his shoulders were off, etc., to the point I completely finished the page and was about to upload it here, but I glanced at it again and didn't like how Kale's jaw was shaped in the first panel and went back into SAI just to reform it, touch up and fix the color/shading, put the fixed panel on the page, and putting the page through Flash and Photoshop again to get a new finalized page, which is the one you're getting now. :B 

I guess it comes down to me not having drawn Kale in a while, and he's probably the hardest to maintain consistency on to be honest. When you have only one single solitary human character and all the rest of your cast are animal people, it's not really a surprise. The difference between basic human and furry facial shapes and structures are more different from each other than between two furries of different animal species, I feel. With furries, despite the variety of shapes muzzles and beaks come in, it's still basically shoving a 3D shape onto the same place on the head every time, which dictates eye placement, cheek placement, ear placement, and so on, and while the shapes of those things also differ, there's stll common general ground. Humans on the other hand largely tend to have a completely different structure in terms of nose, ears, cheeks/jaw, and so on. Maybe it's just me, but that's why I think I have more difficulty getting Kale on-model compared to any of the other characters. Maybe that's why some artists just shove an animal nose on a human face.

In terms of script, there was also some minor changes from the .txt I put up in March (yes it's been that long), and that's a lot more common than tweaks to the art. Don't really bring it up much but I often have to cut down or pad up the dialogue to fit within the empty space of each panel. It's rare that it fundamentally changes what happens in the comic at all, it's usually just small word additions, or additional dialogue to create new minor jokes in the middle or beginning. For example in this page, I changed "PROBLEMS" to "DILEMMAS" as a deliberately 'weirder' word for comedic purpose, as well as the nervous laughter to further highlight Bruce's inability to hide his dilemmas). The biggest example here though is the final panel; in the script Bruce shouts that line in all-caps with a really angry overblown reaction, building on the previous amplifications in the previous uses of the running gag. I felt like that was too similar to Bruce's shouting at Gus, so instead I went with Bruce's reaction being more subdued and fed up, gritting his teeth and asking the question with no punctuation of capitalization to demonstrate him being beyond outrageous rage to the level of still-mad-but-without-the-stamina-to-yell, or something like that.