If you hop over to Top Web Comics and vote, you can see a panel from tomorrow's page! Which still needs soooo much work, so you know, good thing I don't have a lot planned today. Behind on life! I don't know if anyone was wondering where Marin wandered off to, but there she is! I wanted to show that the day has kind of gotten to her, so her outfit's a bit stripped down than it was like, half a chapter back. She's a werewolf, so it's not like she needed that sweater anyway. Still struggling with color! I ended up basically...fixing it in post with this page. My natural tendency is to to desaturate everything, I guess for cohesiveness, but the end result ended up looking rather sickly. So, I jacked up the color a bit until I ended up with a page I liked. Marin looked like a vampire in the original version :p. I've gotten down how to paint with purple, at least. Just gonna...keep doing that, I guess. I'll probably end up going through these colored pages before this thing ever goes to print and adjusting the hell out of them with fresh eyes. I'm not sure when I'm printing this beast, though, so it's a problem for Future Shawn. (She has a million things to deal with eventually.) Well, last week I tried online dating (or signed up and then promptly stopped checking it), and this week I'm gonna try therapy! Oops. I knew online dating (all dating?) tends to trigger my depression, soooo I have to go get my brain straightened out a bit. It's time. I've put off going back to therapy for a long time, but honestly, it's kind of nice to have someone who's paid to just listen to me ramble on for awhile. My last therapist was super nice! I'm not sure she was all that helpful, because I think my general...life...was a bit beyond her scope, but I liked having someone to talk to. So, that's on this week's agenda. That, and painting my damn kitchen. I have floors! But now the walls need attention or whatever. I'm not really sure when I'm going to find time to do that, but I'll make it work. So, I managed to finish the latest season of Bojack Horseman, which probably didn't really help my depression lol. Damn, that's a good show. Having worked in Hollywood, briefly, I saw a lot of people flinging ideas around, but I rarely met anyone who really understood how to take a niche story and make it universal. At the time, every animation studio was trying to come up with the next Spongebob. I interned at Cartoon Network in...2007? Man, that was hell. I wasn't actually on a production, and I'm pretty sure my boss hated me? Though I couldn't figure out why, because the other production teams liked me. They had just made the decision to stop making shows that would attract girls AT ALL. It was decided that Disney had the female market cornered, so they would corner the boy market, and that was that. So, as a result, they were basically throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. The aim, I guess, was to just make something WACKY. SO WACKY. JUST...MAKE IT WEIRD AS FUCK IT'LL BE FINE. A lot of that stuff never saw the light of day, thankfully. Anyway, my point is, there's a reason Spongebob works, and has appeal outside of its base demographic. You can take a really, really weird ass idea and make it work if you have solid characterization grounded in real relationships. The show itself is weird as hell, but it definitely follows a set of rules. Even if you're riding David Hasselhoff to shore like a speedboat, there's a reason in the Spongebob universe that that would make sense. The humor seems random, but it doesn't come out of nowhere. Which brings me back to Bojack Horseman. It's a show about the business of Hollywood. Normally, that's the kind of shit 20-somethings write when they move to LA and think they're special because no one else has ever moved there or lived there or experienced Los Angeles ever. So you write your damn screenplay, and no one outside of the West coast really gives a shit. But Bojack manages to take that really, really specific experience of being emerged in the business of celebrity and shows it plainly for the nonsense that it is. I think that's why it works? Like, there's a lot of bullshit involved in movies and television. A LOT. It involves a lot of terrible, insufferable people to get something made, and Bojack Horseman kind of lays it all out there plainly. At the same time, it's watchable regardless of your familiarity with Hollywood, because all the characters have real issues, and most of them are terrible people. There's a wackiness to Bojack, but the humor has rules. There's a reason you can have killer whales as family-friendly strippers, and that's because the show creates a world where that makes sense. Okay, I've gotta finish tomorrow's page and figure out how to focus again. See you tomorrow!