busybee comics: Pernicious

Although I enjoyed the three or so episodes of Daria that I saw like 10 years ago, and although Jen does probably have some personality traits in common with said fictional high school student (just like every other disaffected teenager on the planet), last I was aware, Daria did not take place in an abandoned hydroelectric dam.

Just thought I’d mention it.

(Anyway, if I’m ripping anything off, it’s Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi.)

work has me extremely busy so i don’t have any time to work on the comic. sorry. hopefully things will get less busy before the buffer runs out though.

For now I’m going to start updating regularly on Tuesdays and Fridays, rather than try to form cute patterns on the calendar. Apparently a regular schedule is the best way to get more regular readers, so.

Grargh, I’ve got to figure out some way of speeding up my workflow. This comic’s too time-consuming considering the amount of free time I have right now. I might just switch to black-and-white for a while, though that seems kinda lame since actually coloring the comics isn’t what takes all the time. I’ve already stopped shading things and pared backgrounds down to the bare minimum, though, and really all that’s left to speed up is the foregrounds.

The only way to speed up foregrounds is to start doing copy-paste on everything, which is something I see as a last resort.

On the plus side, I recently ordered a larger Wacom tablet and that might speed things up a bit. (Currently I use the smallest one, which means to get any sort of precision I have to zoom way in and this means I spend more time scrolling around than actually drawing, and the extreme size mismatch between screen and pen was pretty frustrating too.)

I might also experiment with actually drawing the strip on paper and just using the computer to color and letter it, though I’m not sure if that would really help any.

You may have noticed that the comic is all black-and-white. It turns out that coloring the strip does take a significant amount of time after all. So I’m experimenting with a more minimalist presentation for the time being.

Please don’t hate me!

Especially because I’ve been having some pretty severe carpal tunnel issues recently, and so I need to reduce the amount of hand-using free time activities I do. So the comic is on hold for now anyway.

I might experiment with other ways of updating the comic, though, like I’m considering using modeling clay or something, at least as a temporary diversion. Dunno yet. It’s pretty frustrating because I have lots and lots of ideas for comic stuff!

I’m still just as busy as ever, so the comics are going to be pared down quite a lot for a while, but in the meantime my wrists are somewhat better now so at least I have the physical capability of drawing once again. Today’s comic was actually done TODAY (just now), too. Buffers are overrated.

I think I’ll just be posting comics as I get them done from now on. RSS is totally the way to go if you want to keep up-to-date. (Obviously this message only applies if you come here the old-fashioned way.)

Not that it makes any difference but I’m taking the next week off and am specifically leaving my Wacom et al at home.

A new comic, some layout tweaking (to make the link/forum bar a bit more visible and also to make this part of my site more similar to the rest of it), and also, OhNoRobot now explicitly supports more metadata in transcriptions which is why there’s now these “Improve transcription” links everywhere.

‘Course, my wrists are still sucking. But I only used the computer a couple hours today, so that’s an improvement I guess.