This month had some pretty extreme highs and lows for me. I made a lot of progress on my life cleanup, but also hurt myself pretty badly over and over again. I've finally gotten to an age where I can't ignore my age anymore. I need to think about the actions I take before I take them rather than trusting in a quick healing time if I make a bad call. Then there's also the matter of hurting myself because I think I can still do things that I simply can't anymore. I would kill to be able to hire a young assistant. Unfortunately I forgot to be better at making comics 20 years ago so I could amass the fortune that would pay for such an expense. How foolish of me.
As far as the comic goes I kind of got in a mood of wanting to pile a lot of things onto Evrina so the cafe could be more firmly established as a place for the cast to gather. I should draw a map of where things are in the town someday. Generally i leave things vague for the reader but I know where things are so the writing is as consitent as my memory allows. God Be With Brew sits on the old main street of Marbleton. Rulette's sits about a block away. One block or so in the other direction would be the apartments where the Lincoln twins, Jo, Alex, & James live. Megatainment would be nearly all the way across town. Thomas, Mike, and John live about a five minute drive away from there. Nina and Reggie would live about ten minutes away, give or take, although I've never firmly established where exactly Nina lives, only that she lives by herself. In my mind she rents a very small house in the oldest part of the city. She could live with her parents but chooses not to even though it would save her a lot of money. Reggie and Victoria live with their parents in Murderhouse, which is on the hill of rich people homes far from most of the other characters. It sits apart from other homes though. Some of Alex's extended family live in the same area. Alex's mother lives in the old home of their great great or whatever grandfather that was the original library before the actual library was built expressly to be a library. Maddison lives with however many parents she has left in the older section of the city for the old upper middle class. I never fully established in my head if both her parents are alive, but I figured she probably wouldn't live on her own because of her needing to be managed a bit. Evrina and Ramon live above the cafe, but that was mentioned recently. It's technically not an apartment. The building used to be some other business but as the main street fell out of favor the upper floors of the building were left empty. They have been making the floor above into a living space. The floors above that are empty, but they are allowed to use some of the space for storage if they need to. The owner uses some of the the same space to store random things because it would cost more to make the spaces into living areas than to just leave them sitting empty. Wes lives in a more modern part of the middle class section of town with his father. It's about seven minutes away from Megatainment by car. Carol lives the farthest away and I'm not sure if it's ever been said in the comic but where she lives is supposed to be Scott City, which is a real place. I can't exactly remember where it is in relation to Marbleton anymore but it's at least an half an hour away. Scott Lake, where they intend to dump the ashes of the corpse they found in the hotel, is also a real place. I haven't been there since I was a teenager and barely remember the layout. I don't mention the specifics of the area much because my memory of it has faded so badly over the last twenty years i can barely remember any of it. About the only thing I can recal about Scott City is that they had a Dairy Queen and it was a hub of activity. I honestly can't even remember if it has a school or anything. I think it has all the way up to a high school but I couldn't swear to it anymore. For a city dweller a thirty minute drive to work probably seems like nothing, but for me, with my vague sense of time, it always seemed like it was hours and hours away. I based her situation on a lady I worked with who actually lived there and was a teacher. I used to think it must be extremely annoying to drive that far for her to work a part time job, but it's probably nothing compared to how annoying it must be to be a teacher. I set that up so that it would illustrate how Carol was more responsible that everyone else but then never really made a point of explaining it. She has to take longer to get to work than everyone else but always gets there early, which to someone like me with a very skewed worldview, seems like the pinnacle of responsibility. Thomas, in contrast, lives very close to work and still doesn't get there on time. In my mind it shows the vast gulf in maturity between them.
Anyway, there's a little behind the scenes info that hasn't really been made clear before. in fairness it hasn't been made very clear now, but it's a little more clear. I intend to post a little extra art tomorrow either before or after I finish the page for Monday. I have one sketch I posted to the discord but never posted it here, so that's one in the chamber. In any case I wanted to get this post up so I wouldn't have to rush if something happened tomorrow.
As always, thank you for supporting my work. It means everything to me even though I don't do a very good job of expressing that through extra content. I live in hope though, so maybe soon I will get to a point where I can churn out more. Regardless, I hope you are here with me whatever may happen.