48HCW comic take 2, with a lil commentary <3

Happy Tuesday! Apparently Android users weren't able to view all the pages I posted yesterday in the gallery format, so here's an inline version of that 48-hour comic I did, with a little bonus commentary since it's easy to comment below each image here. :)

(That's the apartment Kris and I lived in in college.)

I had this little daydream when a gnat got stuck in my eye last week. Pretty sure gnats are just looking for hydration, but WHAT IF...

The $3+ poll I ran Saturday for "which flying animal - crows, bats, or swifts"  was for a much later page, but I wanted to add a little unity between scenes, so I waited to draw the middle panel until after the poll was finished. Bats just barely won! A seasonally-appropriate choice, thank you poll-takers. :)

Panel one is a nod to my friend Cat, who's in here - I hope she sees it. ;) I ran out to take a photo of the barn where that graffiti used to be - it's since been painted over. It's a Margaret Atwood quote. 

Another daydream. When I cleaned the room Erika was staying in during her & Lucy's visit in August, I found these seeds, as if she'd shed them from herself and was waiting for me to plant them and grow my very own Erika. (Turns out the seeds were actually from Lucy and Lucy insisted I NOT GROW THEM OUTDOORS because they're eucalyptus seed pods and can be invasive! So, I'll grow them indoors.)

I was planning on making the Plant Person a marigold that Steph stuffs her head into, but y'all voted on honeysuckle and that gave me a bit more of a challenge!

This feeling was from a dream, based on my childhood home. Everyone in the neighborhood had one of two floor plans. We all knew where the bathroom was in a neighbor's house, even if we'd never been inside that particular house before.

This tiny room inside a tiny door (I guess I have a thing for tiny doors) was from a dream I had last week. The tiny room was actually a bedroom, though, and filled with cobwebs. I did not go in. I just quietly closed the tiny door and left it be.

The Creek was the center of my world when I was little (rivaled only by The Woods, a sliver of untamed trees & weeds on the steep side of our land growing up). The Creek was behind Miss Vickie's house. Sam and my brother and I spent the majority of our time down there picking up rocks and chasing crayfish and catching minnows and stomping new trails through skunk cabbage. 

This is the first time I've tried to draw this childhood memory. The water that collected below the culvert pipe - before it continued into the creek that wound through the whole neighborhood - only dipped down a couple feet, but it seemed impossibly deep. We never ventured into it; it was sacred. I'd watch the water pour out of the pipe like a campfire, and dream about what was below...

I wish I'd made the bats smaller and Steph incredibly small, to push the idea that Bat Kate is enormous, but... you get the idea.

Shhh ignore the fact that a mug with a handle wouldn't roll a bunch of times before it's stopped by said handle.

Channeling Ramón Pérez's Tale Of Sand in this one.

Somewhere around here - page 19? - Ryan hit me up to join him for drinks at the Meck. It was so beautiful out, I couldn't pass it up. I had two drinks and came home to finish the last 5 pages in 4 hours. Thus: fuck backgrounds!

I wish I'd made Kate and Steph super small in the last panel to make it feel more like an ending, but, again... you get the idea. :)

While I was working on this over the weekend, I couldn't help imagining myself doing a 48-hour comic regularly - maybe taking one week off Elephant Town between every couple of chapters? - because it's such a rush and so empowering and so much fun! I'll think about it in the future. 

It also feels really good to give you all something new while I take off time from ET to tackle Studio Tour and website stuff. I hope it makes up for the mini hiatus a little bit. :)