#033 - Wes then attempts to take a swim in the holopond.
Strange women fondling your ear and then making ponds disappear is a little on the weird side. Riker’s not out of line here.
I’ve been playing around with purposeful (rather than just literally-to-make-things-more-colorful) use of color a bit lately — aside from the occasional Hulk Mad red, I feel like maybe it works narratively to indicate in-character vs. out-of-character stuff with grey vs. colored panels. Makes me feel a little more okay with the shifting description-vs-speech thing without having to throw quotes around every panel of stand-alone dialogue, for example, now that we’re really getting into interactions and conversation with non-player characters. Some of it’s sort of borderline stuff, though — if Geordi is both chastising Riker and doing some flavor text in the same panel, how to treat that? Etc.
Still developing my feelings about it; mostly my priority is to keep the coloring subservient to the scripting and not vice-versa, so those borderline things may just have to suck it up and deal with being ambiguously colored.
tk
Comments rightly noted I'd spelled "monastary" wrong. I'm pretty sure I sorta-kinda intended go back and fix things like this Real Soon Now at the time, but it was honestly a pain in the ass to go back into PS Elements, fix, re-export, re-upload to WordPress, and swap out the images in a way that didn't somehow make the CMS freak out a little. The prospect of just maybe not clearly won out a lot of the time.
At one point I know I was considering the idea of ditching pre-rendered comics entirely and instead importing all my headshots into a home-rolled strip-rendering script where I could specify a headshot and supply text for each frame and render the whole thing as just html and CSS; would have made it possible to both generate and updates strips in less abstruse way, if done right. I don't remember how far down that rabbit hole I went; I certainly never got it sorted out enough to put up new strips. If I were doing this today, I might chase that idea down a little more actively, though, since the old workflow is itself so rotted away over the last decade+ that there's no sunk cost to be fallacious about anymore.