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3-21 Busted

Friday, October 19th, 2007

- commentary -

Craig: When I drew panel 1, I envisioned the teacher writing at a whiteboard, but to my surprise I found you had imagined it as a chalkboard.

J.D.: Actually, I originally saw it as a whiteboard too, but when I was working on it, it just seemed more universally recognizable that Lucky was specifically in class by changing it to a blackboard.

Craig: It’s very effective. I like how you captured the effect of the erased chalk dust on the board.

J.D.: It always bugged me in school when teachers didn’t fully erase what was previously on the board before writing something new. It always bothered me. I wanted the board to be fully erased before they started writing something new.

Craig: For the screen shots, I used OpenOffice 2.1 as the spreadsheet program. Lucky’s running Mythband on her screen of course, and her classmate has Wikipedia open.

J.D.: As well as a book.

Craig: I had the experience several times in college where we’d have twenty students in a class while a professor lectured, and all of them were doing work for other classes at the time. I always thought, “why even bother being here? It would be easier to study in the quiet of your room!”

J.D.: But, the college you went to docked points for missing classes without a written excuse. It was pretty stupid, but there you go. That’s why they were doing something else in class; because it was better to irritate the professor while being there than lose points for not showing up.

Craig: Not all my classes were like that, but most of them were. I thought it was dumb too. I mean, I’m paying them to attend the class, why should they dock me if I don’t show up?

J.D.: They still get paid. However, I like Lucky’s professor. He’s obviously not angry when he catches her playing games, which suggests to me that he may be something of a gamer himself, and therefore understands and appreciates the temptation.

Craig: I was attempting to capture a sort of Japanese manga feel in panel six, where Lucky’s expression is exaggerated to show her embarrassment. Unfortunately I didn’t really pull it off. Lucky’s eyes just look wierd.

J.D.: Well, when you originally drew it, you had the word bubbles in the background and all that completed the feel. When we translated it to the page, we dropped those details and therefore lost some of the nuance.

Craig: Yeah. It’s fun to experiment though, even when it doesn’t come out the way I hoped.

J.D.: It helps to have forgiving readers.

Craig: I had great fun “researching” Lucky’s battle with Gorlum by simulating it in Angband.

J.D.: Gorlum is obviously not exactly like Gollum, however. Gorlum is cold-blooded, for starters.

Craig: And capable of stealing items, which arguably makes him more annoying than Gollum.

J.D.: But he has less hit points, which makes up for it.

Craig: I think my favorite panel to draw was panel 4, where Lucky finally drinks the potion and sees Gorlum. I usually have the same reaction when I finally off Gollum in Angband. For an early monster, he’s pretty tough, and can kill you if you’re not careful.

J.D.: I usually play high-elves, so I don’t have much trouble with him.

Craig: I thought it would be funny to draw the “Magic for Beginners” book –

J.D.: Like a Little Golden Book?

Craig: Exactly! As though it were a book designed for child mages. As the books go up in power, they go up in coolness, too. As we’ll see.

J.D.: Assuming Lucky survives that long as a mage.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Penance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

13 Responses to “3-21 Busted”

Timo Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 12:19 am
Delling? Lucky Delling?
Georg Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 2:36 am
I think Lucky is not her real name.
BarlowBrad Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 5:48 am
Nice! I love this one so much! Perfectly captures the moment when you first figure out how to kill Gollum.
Z Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 6:14 am
Her e-mail is ndelling@chu.edu so probably yes, Lucky is not her real name.
Paffa Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 7:47 am
Seems to be Gorlum, not Gollum I wonder if he dropped anything {excellent} for Lucky?

Someone seems to be using wikipedia during class
Jason Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 10:18 am
And so Lucky discovers another pair of critical rules of gaming:

If gaming when other priorities are supposed to be fulfilled:

1)Keep an eye on your supervisor’s location(as well as any snitches).

2)Avoid yelling at the characters in the game.

Naturally, lucky learned this the HARD way. Although, I will admit, it shows progress that she’s figured out Gorlum’s weakness this fast.
Timo Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 10:23 am
In “2-13 Jerks” her father calls her “Nissa”. So ndelling@chu.edu could then be Nissa Delling. Or maybe Nissa is also some nickname.

BTW that picture of her char yelling “There you are…” is wonderful. I wonder if she said it in loud, and got busted. Wonderful artwork in mythband-scenes. Not so good for “real” world.
MyrddinEmrys Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
those are some crazy eyes that “Gorlum” has. Looks like he’s wearing some crazy glasses with invisible frames
Maverick Says:
October 19th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Haha. I love this one. “THERE you are you little MAGGOT!” is perfect. I like how this one brings in a comedic interruption to the darker side of the storyline. It definitely is one of those things that has been helping give the strip the feel of a real story, or almost a “movie” feel.
Mars Says:
October 20th, 2007 at 6:02 am
Either Gorlum is a beefed down version of Gollum, or there’s some tedious turns left out in which Lucky slowly chipped away at its health while being robbed blind even more.
Rob T Says:
October 20th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Shouldn’t Lucky be able to see Gorlum even without the potion? Infravision and all that…
Graham (topazg) Says:
October 21st, 2007 at 5:49 am
Is it only me that wonders why Gollum got beefed up so much in the first place?

Gollum never used to have sick hitpoints, I wondered if someone stuck in an extra 0 on the hitpoints by accident on one of the earlier versions :S
Z Says:
October 27th, 2007 at 4:36 am
AFAIK the chalk dust is bad for computers, and so computer rooms tend to have whiteboards, not chalkboards.

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3-21 Busted

13 Responses to “3-21 Busted”

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