“A Life in the Woods” closer, first draft version!
Channing Hey, gang! As you know, scripts go through a lot of changes between their initial draft stage and the final product you see on the page. This Sunday, I thought it’d be illuminating to look at the very first draft of the ending of “A Life in the Woods.” You’ll see a lot of similarities but also quite a few points where we diverged from my initial take. You may take a look at the complete three-week block of scripts right here! Hope you enjoy, and if you like this sort of thing and want to see more, consider pledging to our Patreon at the $5 level or above to see me do it every week to the strips in our rather tremendous back catalogue.
Shaenon: Oh, man, I changed so many of Jeff’s scripts in this storyline. Sorry, Jeff. This ended up being a story with a lot of characters and a lot of moving parts, so I kept trimming details to simplify.
To wit: Originally a bunch of characters were going to fly into Carbondale to help rescue Tip, and Jeff kind of forgot Unity was still a disembodied head from the previous storyline, and when I pointed it out he had her attach her head to a vine from the biomass during the inevitable battle, which was extremely rad. But then I nixed the idea of anyone flying on board Nick anyway because we’d established that his invisibility cloak didn’t conceal passengers, and I cut the rescue party down to the essentials: Nick and two St. Charlie scientists on invisible bikes that were invisible solely so I wouldn’t have to draw bicycles.
Oh my gosh, everybody, making comics is hard.
Also, I need to do more wallpaper designs with unicorns because Jeff won’t use a desktop wallpaper unless it has unicorns on it.
Jeff has excellent taste in wallpaper subject matter.
And excellent taste in games.
I was going to comment on the excellence of the game icons too.
Agreed. Was going to comment on the same thing.
I was gonna comment that he should make a folder for his games and clean up his desktop what is he an animal?
I have all my program icons down on the taskbar, which is set to auto-hide. I have wallpaper on my screen so I can actually see it, which is impossible if it’s all covered up with other stuff.
Hades back in March 2020. *Exceptional* taste.
Thanks for sharing this look behind the scenes! I do wish the bits between Trinity and Gail, and Trinity, Sweetheart, and Unity had made it into the final comic. Those were fun bits!
One of my favorite quotes (not the least because it was used to title a Longmire book, but still.) This looks GREAT. Also, unicorn wallpaper is almost as good as ferret wallpaper; totally approve.