Making of "Chicken Strip"

Good news everybody!  I figured out making time-lapse videos in Clip Studio!  I'd tried other methods of screen recording before, but they were always a pest because I stop and start comics a lot (#momlife!) and would have to knit the videos together afterwards with low levels of success.  The way Clip does it is masterful though!  Just toggle on recording and the finished movie looks like it was all done in one sitting!  Unfortunately I didn't think to turn it on until I was just about to ink, but hopefully I'll remember earlier and get some start to finish comic process vids down for you!

So, onto the elephant (chicken?) in the room!  Talking animal worlds always have the lurking issue of how other animals work.  As a kid, it annoyed me that Goofy was a talking dog, but Pluto was a pet.  However, as a nerdy adult, the idea of a world without any kind of tiered ecosystem was even more troublesome!  My headcanon solution was to make "lower" creatures like bugs the animals, which is why there's never been a talking bug.  The Litterbox Family could maybe even have a pet beetle that acts like a dog?  I told a few people this though and they thought it would be weird. :(  I also had the issue that there's clearly been "normal" food in the comics already.

I decided if I couldn't make the world make sense, I might as well table-flip the whole thing and have some fun with it!  

Originally I drew Vincent and the other kid sitting next to each other so they could be exchanging a "Should we tell him?!" grimace at the end.  It felt unbalanced though, so I moved the chicken to the middle.  I pulled in the linework for the reoccurring turtle kid J drew him for me back in 2019 -I've always enjoyed his derpiness.  

As the chicken is a kid I thought he'd have to be a yellow chick, but J pointed out that Disney's Chicken Little looks older, so why not have a bit more fun with the design?  I was glad for the reasoning, because I'd been worried a yellow bird wouldn't be as instantly recognizable as a chicken.

I was having issues fitting the Lunchables box in, so I tried having the chick just hold up a dino nugget instead.  I realized it was funnier having him being deceived by the packaging, so it went back to being a box again.

People in replies were crediting me with the Easter egg of the turtle with the straw referencing that video that made everyone feel bad about straws, but I didn't actually make the connection myself!  I just wanted him getting something out of his lunchbox and a turtle with a tropical drink seemed right.  Speaking of the lunchbox, it's actually been in the comic before!  It was in a bonus panel way back in 2018!  I thought about updating it, but the composition and animal choices where already pretty good (Bald Eagle Capt., Armadillo Ironman, Horse Thor and Bunny Hulk) so I just traced over it.