Selkie

"Shake it off" is probably a very poor choice of words.

I went through multiple iterations of what action Selkie should take to defend herself against Truck in this strip and had a hard time weighing pros and cons of different reactions. First draft of this scene, she bit him. And I did not miss all the readers calling for that particular action beforehand, either. ;) But I decided biting him, with her sharp teeth and venomous saliva, presented too many problems story-wise. How does she explain it to witnesses? How drastic of an effect does it have? Does Truck even LIVE through it? A different iteration on this theme had her spit a huge loogie in his face instead of biting, but that had the same problems. Another draft had Selkie screeching right in his face and slashing with her claws. The problem here is that Selkie, by the nature of her character design, walks a very fragile line where she can easily become too "monstrous" and lose empathy. Plus slashing with her claws creates more witness and severity of reaction problems on top of that. In another draft, she dodged the grab, returned snowball fire, and knocked Truck over on top of Amanda and Tony. It's funnier and more light-hearted than the other ideas and was a strong candidate for awhile, but made her victory too easy and robbed "Tommy the Truck" of his chance to establish himself as a valid threat in the Rogues Gallery. Ultimately, I went with the groin kick because it allowed Selkie to obtain a victory over her aggressor without overdoing the combat elements of the scene or making her victory too easy (you could probably argue that I made it a little TOO difficult for her actually...). Eventually, though... I'd like Selkie to utilize her saliva in self defense. But it's still too early for that. Someday, though. Someday...

I drew the damn thing and this page kind of scares me...

So, as the regular blog post mentions, the strip shown here is not the original scripted installment for today. It's actually very very different. The original version of this strip focused pretty heavily on Moonsong. I've had him planned out from the beginning as being blind in his left eye (hence the bangs covering it), but initially and for the past three years up until now I had intended for him to have a false glass eye, not just a blind eye. The original script for today had Moonsong take a snowball to the back of the head which popped out his false eye. While he was scrabbling on his hand and knees to find it and trying to call a Time Out, Michael made ready to lob another snowball at him, only to be stopped by a barrage of snowballs from Keisha Heather and Ricky. Sandy runs up to Moonsong expressing concern over his false eye being popped out and the action sort of pauses while he looks for it. Ricky finds it in the snow and picks it up, only to be grossed out by the residues left on it ("Eeew! It's all slimy!") Moonsong snatches the false eye out of Ricky's hand angrily and glares at him. With his hair being blown to the side and his empty socket exposed Moonsong retorts to Ricky, "Of COURSE it's slimy! It's been in my head!" I've had that scene and the "Of COURSE it's slimy! It's been in my head!" line running around my mind for almost as long as Moonsong's been around. In fact, the original draft of this snowball fight arc was ALL ABOUT the reveal of his false eye and Moonsong's "origin story" before I rewrote it to focus on Selkie. But as the snowball fight built up to the "Moonsong loses his false eye" moment, I started thinking about all the complications it brought up and it felt less and less like a good idea to have included in the arc. Even if I chose to ignore the fact that the whole scene is unnecessary and does nothing but add ANOTHER character thread to the arc, the whole image of Moonsong having a false eye pop out and run around with an empty socket has a lot of squick and gross-out factors involved that would only detract, and not add, to the whole. And I had already been drawing his "false eye" as if it were a "blind eye" anyway, so taking the extra time out of the arc to emphasize and draw attention to it brought nothing to the table. In the end, I chose to re-draw and re-write this strip to focus more on the group as a whole galvanizing and banding together. Which has the benefit of greatly shortening the time away from Selkie's crisis. And as for the false eye, since I was already rendering it as a blind eye anyway I decided to null the false eye premise and just leave it exactly as it appeared to be: a blind left eye. Second Longest Commentary Ever.

Something about the final panel of today's comic made me think of the confrontation between Atreyu and Gmork from The Neverending Story. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies.