Fred is ded.

Sorry for the long absence! I got swamped with work and a to-do list a mile long. Here is a small panel for today.


I'll let you guys hazard guesses at how Fred died. This panel came about when I was planning a different one where Elly was lecturing Mike on not letting yet another fish die and listing all the fish they've had between Fred and the current Frank. I went online to see what names I could use as an alliterative for 'fish', and realized that there really aren't a lot of names that begin with 'F' in western-speaking countries. So this panel was born instead.

Michael's hair is different than the last time I drew Michael since I'm still experimenting with drawing hair, especially for boys. It's harder to draw short hair than longer hair for me, although I really liked the way Dee's hair turned out in the last TFP.

Getting slightly off topic here, I've been playing with a foe-fic about April and an sequel starring Elizabeth, and was wondering if I should write it, which would be much faster, or take the plunge and draw it all as a comic strip? Or maybe a combination of the two, since I'm a very slow drawer? What do you think?

What Dee should have done...

...the night of the fire. This would have happened right after Mike came out with the firemen, and right before he's hauled off to the ambulance. I think even a doormat like Dee should have had at least some kind of reaction to Mike's stupidity, even a delayed one that we never got to see.

Yep, it's a two-fer for you guys! There's some mistakes *coughprofileheadscough* in my art here, but I wanted to put it up anyway, since practice makes perfect and all that. Did you know that there are no pictures of someone slapping someone else on the internet, or at least none I could find? I had to redraw the second panel a million times, especially Dee's hand until it resembled something like a hand that had delivered a smack.

What Mike did was a big controversy among the Foobiverse! Journal and elsewhere...it even made it into Mike's section on Wiki. I don't think it would have been so bad to put the same sequence of events into the FBOFW strip as it was, if Mike had suffered the consequences by having Dee and everyone else call him out on his stupidity, and possibly suffered some ill health. Really, his lungs should either be fried from the superheated air (Heat rises! Second floor!) and/or smoke inhalation. Mike also should have realized what he had done, apologized, and tried to strike a better balance between his writing and family, since he literally got a second chance at life.

I will admit, however, that when I first read the series of strips about the fire, and this was way before I found the Foobiverse, I read about Mike running back in to get his laptop, shook my head and said, this is SO what I would have done! Because yeah, I'm deathly afraid of losing all my writing and art, all my work, you know? But then I thought about it and would I really have risked my life to go back in for these things? The answer really would have been no. I would have stood outside, ranting and crying and hoping that the firemen could knock the fire down quickly and I could save some of my things afterwards. *knocks on wood*

So...what WAS Francoise up to?

I remember that people got in a tiff about Francoise not being in the final-final FBOFW strip, especially in the panel where Liz and Anthony shows off their new son to Jim and Iris, and in the panel where they are dancing. Everyone else in the immediate family got some panel time, after all, except for Francoise. Well she was there, and I'll show you in a moment after I move and refocus the camera...

Francoise really does have to channel all that mental power into something, or explode from all the FOOBishness.

This came about when I was thinking about Francoise and her situation, and then it hit me. Francoise really is like Matilda. She's a three-year-old with an very advanced vocabulary, and her dad even works at a car dealership! I'm not sure if Liz would go the platinum hair route though!

Ugh, this picture took forever to draw, because I had to draw very tiny people! Very, very tiny...so the ink work is kind of shaky. But, on the other hand, this was the first time I drew that many people in proximity to each other, and two different rooms, and I think I did okay with that. I used to have lines indicating walls and a ceiling, but I think the back room looks okay without defining features like that?