Saturday was Funnies Script-Writing Day. It’s something that happens every so often, when I run out of Funnies scripts to draw. Last Funnies Script-Writing Day I concluded the Tomaw storyline, drew two standalones  and started the push for the next big storyline. You can obviously conclude that on Saturday I had to continue with the next big storyline, which was scheduled to start tomorrow. I was stumped however.

My original plan was to only include three characters in this storyline. That meant there were six main characters I had to write out. I’ve known for months that not everybody would be involved, but I didn’t stop to think about why some characters would be sitting out. When I started writing on Saturday I realized that I had no plausible reason for four characters not to help out and a fifth character’s reason not to participate was contingent on sitting out one of the characters that WAS supposed to be involved.  The latter was solved by simply switching the characters’ places since I wasn’t really attached to one participating over the other.  Of the four others, I’ve decided to add one to the storyline because I realized he simply had to go. For the three others, I created a situation that conveniently wrote them out. However, just dropping the situation in cold felt TOO convenient. It was almost worse than not giving them a reason at all to stay home.  I needed to give a little setup.

All it took was one new strip and a rewrite of one of the lines in a strip that I’d already drawn for the storyline, but it makes all the difference (to me at least).  Because I want the storyline to start on a Tuesday, I wrote another standalone for this week and used it as an opportunity to set up another gag in the storyline. Despite being last-minute inserts that I squeezed in for purely expository purposes, I like the gags. The best thing though is that the situation I created to write the three characters out actually gives me ideas for the main story.

All this talk and so far, nothing about birthdays. Well, I wanted to start with the writing bit, but liked “Birthdays and Whatnot” as a title better than “Writing and Whatnot”. I can do that. Anyhoo! So what’s up with birthdays? You’ll note that Thursday (August 15^th) was Big Oonch’s birthday. It follows Nektara’s birthday (August 9^th) pretty closely. That’s because Big Oonch and Nektara are characters I created specifically for friends of mine whose birthdays are, you guessed it, August 9^th and August 15^th. Last year, when August 9^th fell on a strip day, I decided to make that Nektara’s birthday and made a strip out of it. This year, August 15^th fell on a Thursday, so I continued the tradition. Zoë was also created for a friend, whose birthday is actually today, but as Monday isn’t a strip day, she doesn’t get a birthday call out in a strip this year. That’ll be for another year. For now, Happy Birthday Lyne!

With all that said, I thought it’d be fun to set the birthdates for the other Funnies characters, so here they are:

·         Barnaby – February 2^nd
·         Tomaw and Nolan the Pickle Patch Bandit – February 12^th
·         Deema – March 17^th
·         Skitter – April 2^nd
·         Red Rich – June 25^th
·         Todrick – July 1^st
·         Nektara – August 9^th
·         Big Oonch – August 15^th
·         Zoë – August 19^th
·         Clive the Pickle Patch Bandit – October 3^rd
·         Popkin – November 14^th
·         Clive the Pickle Patch Bandit – November 18^th
·         Sass – December 21^st
·         Crismus – December 25^th
·         Cyran – Unknown

Why is Cyran’s birthday unknown? Because it’s the same date as mine and I don’t like sharing that information. For those of you who know, well now you can celebrate Cyran’s birthday in secret as well. (Don’t post the date in the comments suggest!)

So that’s all for now. Have a good week, y’all!

I’ve been laying out the pages for the crossover with the part of the script I’ve written so far. Nothing drawn beyond page one of course, but I’m up to page 14 and I estimate that I have enough script to get to somewhere in the ball park of 25-30 pages.

As opposed to the Funnies, where I use a comic strip approach, I’m using a comic book approach for the crossover. I don’t have to worry about a gag fitting on one page. So instead of writing gags that can be encapsulated in 4-6 panels, I just write out dialogue. A conversation can take a page and a half if it needs to and I can start a new scene in the middle of a page, something I wouldn’t do in a strip. Until I started laying it out, I had no idea how many pages the dialogue I’d written would take.

I was going over my old synopsis notes and I realized that the story evolved in my head since I wrote those notes. I thought I’d do things in four parts:

1) Intro/Encounter
2) Seeking Wisdom
3) Working Towards the Goal
4) Final Encounter/Conclusion

I know how parts 1 and 4 work out, I’m still trying to flesh out parts 2 and 3. I’ll need to start writing again. I usually figure out how things out as I’m writing. Maybe the story will end up shorter than I imagined/hoped it would (I’m hoping for a minimum of 100 pages). I don’t want to start drawing until I’ve figured out the whole story. At one page a week once I get started, that means two years to tell the full story. If I build up a big enough buffer, maybe I’ll post more than one page per week.

That’s the update for now. More news next week. About what? Who knows? 🙂