Selkie doesn’t want the bacon from the beans because all the bacon flavor’s been boiled out.
– – – – –
I have a small announcement to share with everyone. I’ve been wanting to get a second project off the ground for a long while now. These characters have been with me longer than the entire Selkieverse, but they’ve mostly stuck around sketchbooks and margin scribbles and never saw much light of day.
So please check out my second webcomic, a small side-project to Selkie: The Adventures of Sue and Kathryn!
It updates on Selkie’s off days, Tuesday Thursday and Saturday. And if you’re wondering why I am announcing a T-T-S comic on a Monday, you’ll be happy to know that the first two weeks (six strips) are already up. I wanted to make sure the workflow would work to do both concurrently before I took it live.
There’s even comments already. A few eagle-eyed readers noticed it when I covertly slipped a link onto the Selkie menubar. Good eyes, gang. 🙂
Yes, I’d say it still counts. Not as much, but it counts. There are always times when we KNOW we should do something, but don’t really WANT to. “I screwed up and know it, but don’t want to admit it, but my parents say I have to.” Would that adults had parents able and willing to exert that kind of influence!
So, are they just sorry for “unjustly punishing them for tricking them”, or for ganging up on them in the first place?
The former was an intentional, abusive plan, and the latter was something that happened in the heat of the moment at Tony’s suggestion. While they do have two things to apologize for, the former is much more important.
My point is that punishing them for getting them in trouble for ganging up on them like that is even worse.
Well to her credit, we do know that she’s sincerely sorry. And grownups tend to not care about child-etiquette enough to allow children to apologize in anything other than the most explicit, public, awkward way.
Oh god, I remember that from being a kid. XD The point where you’d be apologizing ANYWAY, but you also GOTTA apologize, and you want the other kid to know so that THEY know that your parents agree. I was on the receiving end of a few of those.
Amusingly, me and those kids usually ended up being best friends later.
Why is Selkie getting her food from the cafeteria? Surely she should either be bringing it from home due to the fact she’s carnivorous.
I was thinking the same thing! It doesn’t make sense that she’d have a cafeteria lunch. The only reason I could think of is something that my niece and nephew did and that’s go through the lunch line even though they had a packed lunch because they liked what was being served that day.
I was actually thinking that she’d be getting a specially-prepared meal from the cafeteria due to ‘food allergies’. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for the school cooks to make one meal of scrambled hamburger instead of going to the trouble of making a full burger. Mix in a little cut-up bacon and ham cubes and you’ve got a recipie for a happy carnivore. 🙂
That could be a thing too. Too bad that didn’t happen since she’s trading food items.
It’s possible that the hamburgers come pre-packaged, and that the hamburger patties have never been touched by human hands, gloved or not.
She prefers hot food and has friends willing to trade.
Selkie should get a medal for that, you know? She´s making the other kids voluntarily eat more of their veggies.
I tend to believe that orphanages don’t have bunches and bunches of money, so their kids would most likely be on the “free or reduced lunch” program. And yes, she has a father who can afford to buy her lunch now, but after three years of school lunches, she undoubtedly has the “get rid of the nasty green and yellow stuff in exchange for meat” down pat.
Remember the stolen shirt incident? Lunch that day was spaghetti and meatballs, and she just ate the meatballs.
I would guess that, when school started this year, Todd asked her about packing her lunch, and she explained how she traded off the rabbit food for real food. And as long as it works for her, and she’s good with it, being a “good Daddy”, he goes along.
“We ARE, it’s just … we also GOTTA”. No statement could ever more perfectly capture the spirit of a kid.
TODAY’S trade suggest she has to do this every day. The school must know of her dietary needs and yet every day she has to rely on trading with her friends? This is a bad school.
Why does the school necessarily need to know anything about her dietary needs? She has friends, and she has solved the problem on her own. Maybe from the first day she went to that school on.
The only way “the school” would know about that is if someone told them. Which might be the result of a situation where Selkie didn’t get food, and told someone at the orphanage about the problem.
But if, from the first day on, Selkie just traded with her friends, there is no problem. And if a teacher sees the trading going on, well every child likes x better than y, so i assume trading parts of your food is not that uncommon. Basically, there is no problem, the system works. And if it never did not work, there is no real reason for anyone to complain.
Selkie knows what she can eat, i don’t know if schools necessarily need to know all about the food allergies of every single student. If there is a problem and a child doesn’t get food, sure. But if everyone is happy with the solution as it appears to be in this case, there is no real need for change.
Also, the obvious solution if you can’t eat the stuff in the cafeteria is to bring your own food, where you know exactly what you can or can not eat. I am sure Todd or the orphanage before him would gladly have solved the situation in this way if it had ever come up as a problem.
“Why does the school need to know…” I was thinking that myself. Then memory kicked in.
The school knows. Panel 4.
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie151/
Because that is the schools responsibility. They need to know so they don’t accidentally POISON her. Besides that, it’s a thing to cover their own ass. Besides that, I am pretty sure there’s actually laws regarding schools having to provide th correct dietary needs for students, regardless.
So yeah the school does have to and any responsible school would without having to be asked to. Besides since it could be considered a food allergy they’d know already based on her student file.
I mean give me a break.
Selkie is perfectly capable of figuring out what she can or cannot eat; I figure it would be sufficient if she has something signed by the orphanage that she has food allergies and that the kitchen (and whoever else presents anything to eat) are to accomodate the resulting dietary requirements.
Perhaps Selkie and her friends would be more inclined to accept the apology if it were accompanied by sufficient offerings … say, hamburger meat or chocolate pudding, depending on the individual taste.
Given Selkie’s dietary concerns, why isn’t she brown-bagging it?
There’s nothing good to be had from a web artist who can’t even update or post daily and on time for a single web comic and then decides to fill in any other remaining days with yet ANOTHER web comic, it’s more work, more time to spend on other projects when you hardly even manage to stick to your schedule for Selkie without having to go back and color or actually draw in backgrounds.
I am not going to be one of the excited fans praising you for adding more work to your load. I’ve seen it dozens of times, someone already has trouble keeping up to date with one project, adds more and then suddenly a few weeks or a month later they are completely burned out and everything goes to shit.
So good luck I guess, but I am not excited about new projects.
You make valid points, it’s one of the reasons I waited until now to start it up. Sue and Kathryn is a much lighter artwork load than Selkie (by design) for that reason.
I’m aware of my own faults on this matter and working behind-the-scenes to address them.
Jeremy, I take it from your comment that a webcomic has to progress to daily (or at least weekday) updates in order to meet your standards for appropriate scheduling. I disagree with this notion: the schedule should be appropriate to the detail of the art and the time the artist has free to devote to the strip.
Howard may be able to update Schlock Mercenary on a daily basis without a single break for years now, but not everyone has his dedication or free time. YAFGC’s artist had to drop out for a bit because the daily strips were beginning to impact the artist’s actual job. Lackadaisy Cats has art that is gorgeous enough to make even a three-days-a-week schedule completely untenable — it’d be great to see Lackadaisy get to even a once-a-month schedule if it were only consistent. And Girl Genius runs fine on thrice weekly despite being one of the more accomplished comics.
So I don’t think that every comic has to go daily. However, I agree that it is a bit worrisome to see Dave take on a second project when there are still occasional strips that lack coloring – I think it would be wise to establish a good buffer for Selkie (say two weeks of strips, minimum) before taking a side project.
That said, it seems like S&K is designed to be a “break” comic. Like, “Oh man, I’ve spent hours trying to get Selkie’s expression straight, man do I need a break, I’m gonna go sketch S&K for a bit here.” So in that regard, it may be a beneficial move: We all need breaks sometimes.
Mmm… Yes Jeremy, with your vast expertise in the field of comics backed up by your own strip that has updated regularly for years without fail I’m sure you know ALLLL about it!
He’s making a point I don’t feel I can rightfully ignore, though. I’ve seen a lot of other webcomickers try to pick up side projects and it turned out to be a bigger job than they could handle. I’ve seen people much more established than me have to skip updates on one or even both projects because of the workload. And I HAVE had an embarrassing number of strips that weren’t fully completed by update time which sat half finished all day while I was at work until I could finish them later in the evening.
One of my priorities in starting up a second project was to set myself up to succeed by establishing a workflow that will allow me to do Sue and Kathryn and Selkie simultaneously, and I’m entering this with a measure of confidence in that regard. But in terms of my own past performance, as both a comic maker and a comic reader, I can’t deny Jeremy raises a fair concern.
The thought-provoking and very silly Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob has had some update issues over the last couple years as Real Life starts to intrude upon its creator.
I’m not going to pull a Gilbert Gottfried on Dave (“You FOOL!”) until he shows he CAN’T handle it. Give the guy a chance, fertheluvva.
I’m sorry, but this seems unreasonably harsh, even if you make valid points.
Sadly, these days sharing/trading food will get you detention..even if the other kid is hungry. Look it up.
🙁