Page 5 - Who’s Evil?
Wednesday — September 10th, 2008

Page 5 - Who’s Evil?

Comic:September 10, 2008:Pg5

Pulling a cardkey out of the inside pocket of his jacket, Mr. Dentry continued, “A systems check of the house found full power with the battery array and solar panels functional. I activated communications for you. I left a variety of information on the kitchen counter for you to go through over the next few days. If you have any further questions, you can call me at my office. I’ve programmed the number in your vid-phone”

Jake elbowed Sienna in the side, and she flinched away from him, giving him a disgusted look as she did. He nodded with his head towards the railing on the far side of the porch, and it took Sienna only a second to spot what he was looking at. A light brown squirrel looked back at them while clinging to the side of one of the porch vertical support beams. In a flash it had climbed to the railing from where it looked at them intently with what Sienna’s imagination told her was an angry glare.

“Thank you for making the arrangements. Anything special I should know about?” Their Mom asked Mr. Dentry, completely unaware of what was happening behind her on the railing. The squirrel boldly bounded farther out onto the railing, stopping to sit just in front of Sienna and Jake, looking at them with its head cocked and nose twitching, the glare even more intense.

“Just one special note from your Aunt: ‘Don’t feed the squirrels. They are evil.’ You know, your Aunt was a little off her nut towards the end.” Mr. Dentry said as he stepped away from the now open door to reveal a dark interior.

The squirrel twitched his nose again and then suddenly stuck its tongue out at them in what Sienna’s now-overworked imagination said had to be a raspberry. Her rational head instantly declared that couldn’t be possible, squirrels couldn’t do that, but the other side of her brain answered back that it knew what it had seen and what else could it be? Sienna looked over at Jake, who turned to look at her at the exact same moment. From the confused and baffled look on his face, she knew he had seen it as well.

“I included a map of the public transportation network and school complex in your information. I talked to the school briefly on your behalf. They can sign the children up for classes at any time of the day.” Mr. Dentry stepped farther back from the door, looking at his watch nervously, “I have a meeting with a client in less than an hour. Here’s the key to the house. Good luck in unpacking.”

Before anyone could respond, Mr. Dentry had handed over the cardkey, and then quickly stepped past them to hurry towards the hovercar. As they watched him leave, Sienna noticed a group of people gathering on the sidewalk in front of the property, pointing and talking excitedly among themselves.

“Mom, why are those people staring at us?” Jake asked.

“Did the lawyer get squirrels and neighbors mixed up?” Sienna wondered out loud.

*****

Lynn eyed the group of people standing on the sidewalk. From this distance she couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but their hand gestures were very animated. Lynn handed her purse to Sienna and stepped down from the veranda, “I’ll be right back.”

As Lynn approached, the talking ceased, and they looked at her with a variety of expressions, including pity. Unsure what to think she plastered a smile on her face. In a voice she hoped didn’t sound nervous, she said, “Good morning!”

All eyes went to her and the group went silent.

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The Art Continues

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and I’ve already started planning for it (take a look at my blog for more info). Part of this means creating a comic page buffer so that the comic continues uninterrupted. So far the work on that is going great! Octobers is already finished and I have November almost half done.

Talking about writing, I think I’ve finished editing all of Chapter 1. Now to start rewriting Chapter 2. I’m looking forward to catching up to where the old comic format left off.

Yay!

Every day a new thing learned…

First off, the new page is finished and will be up first thing Thursday morning.

Things learned this past month:
1. Text heavy graphics increases file sized much more than expected. I’ll do all I can to keep pages under 150K, but so far if they are compressed much below that the quality really deteriorates.
2. My style has definitely changed in the last few years. Just look at the characters in graphic 1 (from 2005) compared to graphic 2 (new).
3. Hackers are everywhere and apparently don’t have a real life. Instead of spending most of July 4th weekend working on art, instead I was piecing this website back together. Grrrrrr.
4. Monsoons have just started for the season and make me realize anew just how much I miss clouds.

Pardon Our Dust

Well, it turns out Comicshout was just dropped by its creator for various reasons just as I had tweaked the theme the way I wanted. As I didn’t want to get stuck with a dead-end comic script like what happened with Istrip (which I really liked, BTW), I had to go back to researching alternatives. This has now put me at least a week behind.

In the end it came down to only one alternative, and I wasn’t really keen on it: WordPress with the ComicPress theme. To be blunt, it’s been a pain in the neck getting it to do what I want and look like I want. The pluses: Active development and a very active and helpful community to answer questions.

So, here we are, with a new site that still need work, but at least it’s starting to take shape. Now to get busy on the most important part: the relaunched comic! :)

p-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme. * * @package WordPress */ /** * Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it. * * @var bool */ define('WP_USE_THEMES', true); /** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */ require('./wp-blog-header.php'); ?>