Honey Vs. A Young Man’s Fancy

Happy new year!

I wanted this one to look like a show in the Candy Hearts’ natural habitat…and that meant drawing particularly heavily on the Archie/Josie-world influences. Mysterious extras in loud outfits, to the foreground!

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I’m not lookin to date any fellas either. They’re icky and have cooties. Cheers to a New Year!!! <3

I’m definitely not lookin’ to date any fellas #seriousautobiographicalcomix

This one’s kinda the “nice” mirror image to the incident where some obnoxious guy was hitting on Turpentine, and she shoved him off the couch shouting “SCRAM, JERK”

I would be scared to see Turpentine in roller skates… Maybe she would get all roller-derby-aggressive and start pushing and running over people! :-O

Foxy happens to actually be on a roller derby team! Maybe that’s why she’s more enthusiastic about the prospect of skating.

I have this weird feeling that Turpentine wouldn’t be very good at skating. I also feel like she would hate the idea of falling on her arse for everyone to see

Gosh, I’ve totally got a sort of platonic girlcrush going for Foxy. Like she could be the sort of friend I could call up late at night when I’m bored and lonely and suggest that we should break into the Catholic school and play basketball in their gym, and she’d be down instead of telling me to be rational like most of my friends do when I ask.

Foxy is down for whatever, always, and she’s a real enabler/encourager for her friends’ best and worst ideas.

CHEE

I’d think Turpentine would be like ALL ABOUT the skating somehow in theory, but that there’s a history of like embarrassing accidents

Okay also, technical question: WHAT IS A RAINBOW PARTY in a bichromatic world!

I have considered this very question! I’ve also specifically thought about the problem of what a rainbow flag in a gay bar should look like.

My actual answer to any colour-palette-related problem when I’m illustrating this world: I think about how any given thing would look in a comic designed to just be black ink lineart, and then I judge which of the two midtone colors (or both, or neither) would look best in context. The blues vs. the reds essentially work as cool vs. warm.

Getting nerdy and theoretical about it: I think of the palette of this world as both representative and non-representative colour. Like, I think it’s literally true that this is a universe that has the genetics for naturally-occurring blue and pink hair…but there are also a lot of instances where the way something’s coloured is just stylistic (especially when it’s related to the lighting in a shot, like the last panel of this one where everything’s red.)
I think a person in this world would know that grass is green and bananas are yellow, but we just don’t see that. It’s not a fourth-wall joke in-universe, like having someone say “Holy shit, this article says that scientists are close to discovering a third colour!”

tl; dr: I talk about COLOUR THEORY, and leave it up to you to imagine limited-palette “rainbow party” as corresponding to sex acts

I may have mentioned this before (maybe?), but I want to take a moment to appreciate how much I’ve grown to like using the word “heck” in this no-swears world. It’s so self-consciously clean, and yet the way it scans in a sentence and looks with its combination of letters is kind of like “hell” and “fuck” combined and had a baby. Heck yeah. What the heck kind of party is this?

Ha, ha! 😀 Now, I’m gonna impose “heck” into my vocabulary!

I’ve seriously picked up a few weird Band-vs-Bandverse speech and vocabulary things from spending so much time writing it. I’ll have these…moments…where I realize I’ve just pulled out a whimsical retro non-swear-word in a casual conversation, or said something like “SAY, GANG” to actual people.

Love love love, I haven’t been rollerskating in fifteen years, there may still be one rink left open in my city. And I totally get why Turpentine wouldn’t think it’s “cool”, or might be afraid of looking foolish. I did have a totally embarrassing wipe out a rink once, in front of someone I was interested in.

Does anyone remember “Snowballs” where the girls and boys would be on opposite ends of the rink, a few boys would skate over and ask girls to skate…soon the dj would stop the music and the couples would separate and go ask more people to skate…so more and more people would eventually be skating in couples? Pretty rigid when it comes to orientation(that’s the 70’s and 80’s for you)…a rainbow roller disco party sounds like a lot more fun!

I’ve never, ever been to a roller rink! I’ve heard that one exists within reasonable take-the-train-a-few-extra-stops distance from me, though. I wonder if I could talk anyone into going.
I’d probably be a disaster though. A few years ago I assumed that I still knew how to ice skate despite not having done it in years, and…nope.

I never really learned to stop in ice skating, rollerskating or downhill skiing, just call me the Queen of wipeouts.
If you brought enough people with you it could be fun, but it’s mainly kids…the music may also be questionable.

Oh man, I didn’t consider that it’d probably be full of children. Plan cancelled.

Pretty sure that 1961 was the last time the phrase “I think you’re swell, want to go out for a malt sometime?” was used both (1) unironically and (2) as a prelude to anything that didn’t end with someone in a crawlspace.

(Hussy Formaldehyde out.)

-G.

I actually DID think about (2), and how a different comic from the one I’m actually doing here would make it A Twist that this nonthreatening lad turns out to be a murderer or something.

I just realised! Everythings either blue or pink! (Or black or white)

Yeah! I’m all about designing things with two-color schemes, to the point where it’s a running joke with some of my art & design friends — like, that’s one of the clues that makes it obvious that it was me who made something.

Is there anything, anything at all, that I could do to convince you to write more comics more all the time like daily more? This is one of my favorite new comics to read and I am totally squeeing about it.

Thank you!

I wish! And hey, thanks — really, hearing that people are into it is the biggest motivator to keep doing comics regularly (and potentially more often, which I’d love to do but just can’t right now.)

Is that- Is that Nada dancing with the reddish-blond guy?

Ne’er mind. It’s Janet. I’m glad you kept the general design though.

Having a canon version of the Nada design was basically why I invented Janet!

that “Keenest” lettering! <3