-EDIT- Comic had a little downtime due to exceeding my bandwidth allotment. Fixed now, sorry for that!

I apologize to those of you who check the comic right at the crack of midnight CST, had a late start on finishing touches. But, today’s comic comes with a bonus extra: a Behind the Scenes look at the development process.

(I was originally going to share these as a Sketch Saturday, but I think they make more sense posted along with the pertaining comic.)

So, originally this comic was going to be two pages of content. Page 1 was Selkie falling through the sky only to land gently and delicately at the portcullis. Page 2 was Selkie asking the others for a teleport to avoid walking up a long flight of stairs which suspiciously resembled the staircase from Revolutionary Girl Utena. VERY suspiciously so… >_>. For brevity reasons I decided it did not need to be two pages long.

But, for a peek into the editting process, here are the pencils for the original draft of this page(s):


If you’re thinking that the first image, as a stand alone Thursday comic, would have been a bit weak, you’re thinking the same thing I was. I wanted to keep the Utena staircase as a nerdy shout-out, but it became too nonsensical trying to squeeze it in to the top row of panels alongside the castle and the falling through the sky (both of which are more important as scene-setters), and removing anything from the second or third rows of panels would mean less time spent on the characters, which is probably bad (I would think) for a character-driven story. So, sorry staircase. We’ll crack the world’s shell some other time.

I think the end result overall is stronger than if I had drawn and run these two as separate strips. I don’t want another year to go by before we even get out of Selkie’s dreamspace. XD

I was tempted to throw in a Girl Genius reference, what with the talking mad scientist castle and all, but it felt a bit forced.