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.