Not much to say about this one, it’s just Big Full-Page Cliffhanger. (Refer to previous annotations on problems, icebergs, etc.)
…folks, I swear I didn’t plan this schedule so Chapter 10, which in the original update schedule also ran through late-March of 2013, would end on March 31. I just (unlike Jany) got insanely lucky.
Of course, now this means I need to repeat the feat 2 more times, even if it takes some full-on scheduling jujitsu to manage the rest.
I don’t manage to put a lot of these in, but that “water flowing through the gutters” first panel is a sweet little environmental detail.
And, hey, not a bad first (?) stab at drawing a revolving door, in the bottom left.
Commenters around this point were divided about Jany. Sure, she could be more endearing, but you know what, she’s tired and overwhelmed and had a horrible weekend where everything went wrong and just wants to go home. (And to some degree, Sparrow can appreciate it.)
Final day of WhiskerCon brings us Sparrow finally wearing her Doctor Who scarf! And Bianca in a new Sailor-Moon-themed shirt.
Many years before this, I did a convention-themed storyline in And Shine Heaven Now. To fill out the roster of background characters, I invited readers who volunteer at conventions IRL to send in their info, and I’d give them a cameo.
For the BICP con arc, I didn’t invite cameos. The plot wasn’t really adaptable to fit whatever info people sent in, and I would’ve felt weird saying “hey, anyone want to volunteer to appear as, specifically, a teenager with a kink for naked anthro spaniels?” And, to make the place feel crowded without slowing art-production to a halt, characters without speaking roles were mostly reduced to low-detail silhouettes. Not very identifiable.
All of which is a roundabout leadup to saying, I worked in one, but only one, recurring WhiskerCon Volunteer design. It’s the guy in the middle of the center panel, with the square glasses and the bear hat.
Quick, scroll back through the archives and find out how many scenes he’s been in.
We’re approaching a new round of angsty twists and turns for Jany and the main crew, so I figured it was worth taking a moment to send Fox and Dotan out of the plot on a high note.
A silly, earnest, adorable, furry high note.
Be proud of who you are! And, listen, if you happen to think you’re a magical fox on the astral plane who shifted to this universe and got trapped in a human body…all while you’re just doing your own thing and not hurting anyone…more power to you.
Multi-character status montage!
I always want to do these with something tying them together — even if it’s not a substantial Plot Theme, just a recurring phrase. Pretty sure the first time I remember seeing “a catchphrase makes a neat throughline through disparate scenes” was a Sailor Moon fanfic. …and I just spent maybe 20 minutes trying to find it again, with no luck, so you don’t get a link.
Bonus points for any reader who can pull up links for other BICP pages that use this device. Leif & Thorn strips are welcome too.
Given their intrinsic dependence on one Master, it’s no wonder a Being who loses one naturally will be adrift/blank until they find a new one…and a Being whose Contract is forcibly severed will be left as emotionally screwed-up as their psychology has room for.
To a human, a realization like this would be part of the path to “I am an independent person whose feelings and opinions are intrinsically valuable, and I don’t need to suppress them to make myself an extension of someone else’s will.”
For Patrick, it’s more “I am an extension of someone else’s will, so it would really suck if I was bad at it or had been doing it wrong, but you know what, maybe that’s not the conclusion to draw from recent events, maybe I’m still good at it and was doing it right.”
…and in both cases, they’re on the way back to a healthy baseline.
Unfortunately, humans are too varied and inconsistent for a single Being to please all of them.
…which is one of the big advantages of God, at least in the Christian setup. Any group of varied and inconsistent humans has no special reason to knuckle down and submit to a subjective/arguable opinion from one of them…but they can’t object to the objective/infallible decree of a Higher Power!
(And if you find anyone going around claiming that the same Higher Power made a different objective and infallible decree, which doesn’t conveniently line up with what you wanted to do anyway…now it’s torches-and-pitchforks time.)
I don’t know how much this is true in Jewish communities, but modern-day Christians love quoting and remixing the various Psalms about Bringing Glory To [God’s] Name.
It’s not quite the same theme as all the verses about “following all orders and doing only what God wills and not having personal needs or opinions at all,” but I feel like there’s a broader umbrella they all fall under. Something along the lines of “humans aren’t worthwhile in their own right, their only worth is in what they do for God.”
…after enough years of that, I started thinking about what kind of SF/F scenarios you’d get with a species that genuinely can’t develop a sense of self-worth that’s independent from another entity, and, well, here we are.
Hey, look, at some point I did zoom out and put a little more furniture/layout in the hotel room!
Plus, here’s the return of that pool. It all comes together.
I still love that the setup is all “ominous, shadowy, sneaking around in the night” and then the result is this adorable “hi!! hi yourself!!! …huh, what now?”
The Lizard and the Dog have this vibe of being friends, in a vague (because their personalities keep getting rebooted, and their memories of past encounters keep fading) but surprisingly resilient way. It’s not influenced by their species, not in the way the Dog and the Cat seem to have a persistent “snarky frenemies” dynamic. It’s more…they’re super-cute this way, and I like writing it. So I do.
I got into a chibi-sculpting workshop at Otakon once. Not exaggerating how wildly-popular it was.
Not sure what character Jany would’ve tried to make. Maybe a mini Katara? Or, hey, a tiny Kara Lynn. There’s a galaxy-brain take, making a tiny clay human-shaped figure version of your giant clay human-shaped figure.
Me, I made a tiny clay Cybele. Super-cute, totally worth it.
