Merry Xmoose!

This one took a whole freakin' day earlier in the week, two days really - the penciling and inking one afternoon, and hours of tweaking and coloring the next. Not a bad way to spend time instead of housework.

As usual I started out with the highest intentions of drawing everything "as-is" in one image, but as you can see from the initial scan here, some mysterious smearing issues developed which necessitated the overlay of the looping strands of xmas lights on a separate sheet (that and the roll of toilet paper needed to move elsewhere in the remixed composition). This in theory should work well enough, except that the two scans never seem to line up and it takes endless modification to line everything back up the way it's supposed to look. Not to mention positioning all one-hundred-fifty-eight bulbs after that, and then the snowflakes, the stars, etc.

I was inspired in part by learning about the history of "A Christmas Carol" and Dicken's sneaky secular reboot of the holiday - a lot can be said for needing a similar resurrection of spirit these days. Artistic license was taken with Ebenezer's outhouse trip, though the Ghost of Christmas Present does in fact visit a miners cabin.

No telling if the paper(s) will have an option to run the panel in color or not, unfortunately my timing was off (again) and this'll run December 27th, plus in the annual "best photos of the year" issue where real-estate on the color pages is at a premium, but it was designed to work okay in grayscale anyways. Cranked this out on top of the new batch of Nuggets for January, and now that the academic deck is swabbed clear I can get back into the bigger projects lined up over "break." After passing out the 50+ cards made from a reduced-size PDF of this panel! Ho ho ho...

And as I alluded to in the previous post, there was an archaeological expedition into storage to confirm my suspicions that this concept had indeed already been done before, just not this good. Eh.

Happy Holidays everyone...
celebrate safely, be warm & well!