Devbulge Xmas Special: Advent Calendar Comic

Here's an early sketchy version of the WHOLE ADVENT CALENDAR SAGA. In hindsight maybe I should have spread it out a bit lol. OH WELL. LET'S DO THIS.

Oh and YES. The Christmas jumpers and trousers I gave the main characters DID result in this whole thing taking like, twice the time it would've took otherwise. But who cares HOW SICK DO THEY LOOK?!

ROW 1-3: YEAH. Originally it was gonna start with the CHOCOLATE SEX. The "I have plans already" row entered my head relatively late and was slapped on towards the end. That was a blessing really. It was a nice basic joke to introduce the concept for the chocolate sex joke to contrast from. And as a bonus it was also one of those relatable jokes so it gave the calendar story a STRONG START. Especially since it's the comic that everyone kept seeing first every time I added to the twitter thread 8^).

ROW 4-5: I was legit bummed that row 4 ended up falling down into row 5 because "calling all fours" sounds so much better than "calling all fives". But I felt I had to restructure these two rows cause I felt the "calling all fives" wasn't strong enough to end a row with. It had to be the advent calendar police cars. The chocolate policeman made out of hundreds of tiny chocolate policeman was a great drawing challenge though.

ROW 6-8: Here's where the BIG CHANGES started to occur. Where the second protagonist whose words of caution were HEEDED. And they sought alternative escape methods. Let's try and explain this drawing: Basically what's happening here is that door 7 holds the keys, and is located around the main characters crotch. So the main character thinks of something sexy to get a boner and use it to smash through the plastic to grab the keys and fling them up into the number 8 which doubles as an 8-shaped keyhole (PRETTY CLEVER HUH). But yeah, for various reasons this was not pursued further lol. It was for the best really, I mean, had I gone with this. The 2 characters would have had regular teeth throughout the entire comic and that just wouldn't have been right.

ROW 9-11: Nothing changed here since the draft. I was pleased I was able to keep the dogs in row 9 regardless of all the edits. I mean, K-9 is such a minor detail but it was an opportunity for a tiny extra fun joke SO I TOOK IT.

ROW 12: The original idea here was that they burnt the calendar seemingly done with it. But little did they know there was a chocolate fire extinguisher behind door 12. Implying WE AIN'T DONE YET. And the later rows were gonna feature the 2 having christmas fun while the calendar spies on them, with facial features revealing themselves from behind doors every day. But eh, this didn't have the same solid gag variety that the previous half of the comic had. 

ROW 13: Going from row 12 to row 13 makes no sense because I actually wrote this story in a really weird order. I was basically thinking up cool chocolate related gags and throwing them in wherever I could. And I knew I wanted to have them bury someone in a chocolcate coffin. The final version of row 12 was the result of me finding someone for them to accidentally kill to lead in nicely to the burial row.

ACTUALLY WHILE I'M HERE I'M GONNA SAY THIS. I was actually kinda annoyed about the circle game's sudden resurgence in popularity around the time of posting this cause I'd drawn it weeks in advance and was concerned it was gonna look like a shameless bandwagon jump to try and boost likes and people were gonna be sick of it by the time I posted that row. But they weren't, so hooray!

ROW 14-20: This was all pretty solid. I was damn happy with the pregnancy and birth bits, my sagas are usually NOT 24+ ROWS LONG so was really struggling to fill space for the second half so when this idea came and managed to fill up a number of rows. IT REINVIGORATED MY CONFIDENCE. THAT IT COULD BE DONE IN TIME. HOORAY!

ROW 21: Yeah this was a bit of a bland joke. I wasn't keen. GET THAT OUTTA HERE. This was actually the last row I had left to figure out, so I was getting a bit worked up cause I just wanted to focus on drawing everything but didn't want to just in case I came up with a cool idea for row 21 that would mean drastic changes for future panels. This ended up being the WILL READING row. Shame I didn't think to bring back the will reader from a previous comic with the invisible haircut.

ROW 22: If the other character didn't die. The mistletoe would've been the 22nd chocolate and the 2 characters would attempt to kiss with their huge teeth and fail. BUT THE CHARACTER DID DIE. SO YOU GOT THIS INSTEAD.

ROW 23: Gotta have a genie joke somewhere. I was pleased that I thought to include the "premium" glitter graphix from the trick or treat saga. Tbh I felt like considering these were the last few chocolates, they didn't really do much to BUILD UP TO THE GRAND FINISH but eh, maybe the sudden intensity of row 24 was what made it great.

ROW 24: HELL YEAH GOD DAMN THIS TOOK SO LONG. You might've noticed the dragon has a whole lot of squares on its chest. THEY ARE DOORS. The idea was that if the dragon was left to roam free it would gradually release horrific things every day for 365 days or something.  

I was so proud of a lot of things in the finale. How that chocolate dragon came out. The design of rudolph. The way I shaded the fire. I felt like I was really bringing my A game there. And what a great time to bring it. Not only a solid finish to the comic, but a solid finish to a seriously great year for Deathbulge.

I also threw in a bonus SANTADUNK doodle. It was an idea I had for a separate comic which ended up being part of the advent calendar's finale.

THAT CONCLUDES THIS INSTALLMENT OF "DAN BACKS UP A LONG-ASS IMAGE WITH A LONG-ASS WALL OF TEXT"

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas and have a great new year. Thanks again for supporting me <3 <3