Making of "Don't Touch"

One of the "Elf on the Shelf" rules is you're not supposed to touch them or they'll lose their magic. I assume this is so kids don't realize they're dolls, or maybe so they don't hide them themselves! It's bad enough trying to think of somewhere to put our elf every night, I can't fathom having to FIND him first!

I do a lot of rooting around on Pinterest for elf ideas and I've never quite understood how it works when people do very involved setups. Are they just leaving these out all day?! 😱

...do they just not go to the loo?!?

If our elf is somewhere annoying, I use kitchen tongs to carefully place him back on the tree (where I've established the Christmas magic is strongest) but I wondered what might happen without that escape plan. I came up with Joel being constantly told off for almost disturbing the elf, until he gets his "revenge" by locking the fridge up with him -thus securing takeout that day!

I tried to make this one a 2 row comic, but it didn't have enough information to tell the story. The missing parts were 1) That he was sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night and 2) It was him that moved the elf. Once I made the comic 3 rows to accommodate those, I ended up with a bit more room for the 1st panel, which was good because it was a bit squished before!

I also realized it would be weird for a new reader to see all this elf stuff happening with no kids about, so I made it Cooper telling Joel off instead of Fran. Angry Coop is adorable and it let him have him saying "Yes Daddy!" to make the ending sweeter.

(Interesting aside: I think this is the first ever comic to have everyone EXCEPT Vincent! I don't know how that hasn't happened before, but I don't feel it has!)

Working through, I figured out I could make the punchline better, by making the penultimate panel really sinister (like Joel was going to off the elf!) satisfyingly echoing back to my original elf comic with the mafia imagery!

Joel and Fran's expressions in the last panel were difficult. I wanted Joel to have a genuine look of "Wow, would you look at that!" but also that he clearly did it. Meanwhile I wanted Fran's to say "You got me, but well done!". Expressions like these in real life are usually a flash of one emotion and then the other, so when I only have 1 frame to draw it in I often find myself fighting between the 2! I finally managed to get Fran's right and J came to the rescue with Joel's.

Finally I needed some things on the fridge to make it clear what it was, so I stole some props from previous comics. When I was placing the fridge magnets, I accidentally spelled out "shh", which looked like Joel's message to Fran! I didn't want to make the message too distracting, so I just added a little "OK" afterwards.