Heeeey vote over at TWC because I'm way down because it's the beginning of the month, and you can see Elias looking very frazzled about sandwiches. I'm back! Holidays are over and I've been working my butt off trying to get ahead on the comic in the meantime :). I have a buuunch of stuff coming up early this year, so I'm trying to build up a little buffer for the comic so I don't get slammed repeatedly trying to accommodate leaving over and over again. My new work strategy is to try and change it up a little so I don't get exhausted, so I finished the sketches for next week's pages already, but then switched to working on thumbnails yesterday instead of going straight into inking. I always do best if my pipeline is operating at different levels of completion. That way, I always have something to work on, but I have choices about what I want to work on. Helps keep me from just wandering off from working at all. Anyway, back to the creepy mug! I've got plans for a few Charlene Character Development Moments in this chapter, because I didn't have much time for her last chapter. Her development time gets traded off with Marin and Marisa's panel time, unfortunately. Too many characters, not enough comic! Stay tuned for that! In personal news, I'm off to watch the new Star Wars movie today, finally, and it's -3F outside today and that's terrible. Winter is all well and good until you can't be outside for all that long before you lose an ear or something. Start out the season in cute layers and chunky sweaters and neat boots, and by mid-winter, you're in head-to-toe fleece everything looking like you're trying to hide a pregnancy. And snow boots, because all the salt on the roads will destroy your regular boots. And your snow boots. And your floors. And your car. And your life. The salt everywhere might be the worst part, actually. My car never had rust on it until I moved back to Indiana and it had to go through its first winter. It was all downhill from there :(.