I had someone ask recently whether or not I sketched out the panels before I drew them, and so decided to scan in some of my thumbnails.

As you can see from the bottom two drawings, the sketches I do before I draw a comic are VERY rough. They are really just to work out the different character’s placements, as well as to rough in a background. I also rough in where the word balloons will go, since I add them once the picture’s been drawn and scanned in. See if you can guess which two strips these thumbnails belong to!

The image at the top is not a thumbnail, as you can probably guess. It’s more of a joke, actually. You see, while at a friend’s wedding this past fall, there were several comic-y type people in attendance, and as happens when artsy folks all get together, we all wound up sketching together. Mostly, we were drawing random caricatures, but since one of the guys wasn’t overly familiar with my strip, he asked me to sum it up in three panels and about 10 minutes.

This “comic” is the result. I still think it’s pretty hilarious, if only because it makes no sense at all!

If there’s one piece of advice I can give regarding dancing at the goth club, it’s to watch out for all of the sharp bits. I can think of few dance floors that are more hazardous than a goth club on foam night…

I actually had to stop wearing my really awesome spiked bracers because I’d forget about them while dancing and nearly take out my own eyes, or go to hug one of my friends and gouge them in the spine. And, in one particularly painful incident, I managed to crack my funnybone against a nearby dancer’s spiky shoulder piece. Owwwww!!!

Thankfully, I’ve never danced with anyone skinny enough that their mere flesh was a hazard, but I *did* lift Ravenia’s description from one of my RL friends, who described her dancing partner rather similarly.

This week’s sketch is a few dungeon-y backgrounds that I doodled while hanging out in the woods with some friends. The topic of tabletop RPGs had come up, and myself and the sole other gamer in the group spent about a half hour persuading a third friend that gaming was actually pretty awesome. He was quite skeptical at first, since he imagined the games as a type of non-graphical video game where the whole point was merely to smash enemies and argue about who’s character was cooler. (We both laughed, saying that we knew a few gamers who thought that too!)

But, after recounting a few D&D adventures to him, as well as a few stories about particularly scary Unknown Armies moments, he was grudgingly willing to admit that creating interesting stories with your friends might be a worthwhile pass time, after all.

What does that have to do with these sketches? Not much, but it’s a good story, and this picture reminds me of the rain tapping on the windows while we talked.

Hey everybody!

I dropped a lot of plot on you all last chapter that I decided to do another D&D interlude before the next chapter starts, in order to give you all a little breathing room. (And some terrible puns!)

This time around, though, not all of the puns are my fault. We are going to have two strips that were submitted by Weregeeks like yourselves! If you have any puns that you’d like me to use, please drop me an email at weregeek comic at gmail dot com, and I might use your joke in a future strip. Please make sure to leave a name that I can attribute the joke to.

Surprisingly, this commission of a gibbering mouther is not the first I’ve drawn. The first was for a friend of mine, who is a big fan of the squidgy, shrieking lumps of spittle-flinging madness. (Mostly because he finds it hilarious to hit all of his players with Confusion, and then sit back and watch the chaos.)

I still think that the beak-mouth in the middle looks vaguely like a Muppet… But maybe that’s just me.