Vote over at TWC and you can see Mal's very understandable reaction to having a crow in her face. A few people brought up the werewolf council and how this will all go down, and Elias also has concerns! A fun side effect of creating the werewolf council is that 1) it establishes that there is technically a body of interconnected werewolves that could help solve this situation and 2) that means I consistently have to stay ahead of where this story needs to go in order to keep the werewolf council from just stepping in and solving everything so there's a story at all. Yay! Problems! Anyway, the longer I write this story, the more I understand why so many TV shows escalate drama to almost incredible levels over and over again: it really stops you from worrying about details of the larger picture. The fun part of not escalating the drama constantly in this story is that I have much bigger guns that I can still pull out that will actually have impact, versus just annihilating you guys with constant action this whole time. Oh man, this is the last page with this much text for soooo long and I'm totally jazzed about it. The thing about making comics is that it's the collision of two arts: illustration and writing. If you're making a movie or a tv show or whatever, you can have your characters ramble on and on, kill time with a lot of spunky dialog, but not necessarily have to sacrifice the visuals. Ideally, film shouldn't be just a bunch of people standing around talking to each other (thus why you get that infamous "walking down hallways quickly" shot in most doctor/hospital dramas), but the dialog at least isn't PART of the visuals. In comics, your dialog is definitely part of the visuals, so you have to play a constant balancing game. Do I chop this dialog up onto more pages, dragging this scene out even longer, so the page looks less crowded? Or do I respect that the pacing can handle a few pages that are dialog heavy if they're balanced with something else before and after? Also, I'm the minority of comic-makers in that I really like larger fonts for my word bubbles. Considering how many people read on mobile these days, and how small these pages end up being reproduced in print, little bitty tiny text drives me NUTS. I absolutely hate it. But the side effect is that my dialog takes up more space. I try to be careful with how I design my pages so that they can still be read fairly quickly, though. A lot of Western comics, especially superhero comics, are very hard for me to read. I want to be able to enjoy them, but those comics can feel like a real slog sometimes, and I think that comes from the disconnect between the writer and the artist. Even when I go to letter my pages, I tend to chop a lot of extraneous dialog out, or cut words here and there so the text looks better...but you can't really do that if your job isn't to do that, but to just shove all those letters on a page come hell or high water. ANYWAY, rants about comics and lettering and dialog and text size aside, I have a cool announcement that'll be coming down the pipeline later today! I think it'll be good. The side effect is that I will most probably be moving away from a Wordpress-based system to a different one, which should make the site faster and more reliable. The downside is that I can't use Wordpress comments on a non-Wordpress system, and as I mentioned yesterday, that pretty much means using Disqus. I've tried looking up alternatives to Disqus, because I do have some qualms with that platform as well, but I haven't found another non-Wordpress comment system that anyone uses. If you know of one, let me know! Wordpress comments are kind of old school, and while there are plugins that make them more useful (being able to upload images and whatnot), most of those plugins are just sort of slapping a sad patch over a very, very basic comment structure. We'll see! I'll update this post when the thing has been announced, though :)