Making of "Finecraft"

(I'm going to circle back round to the making of the D&D comic, but I need to raid J's computer for art first.)

KC Greens famous "This is fine" comic pops into my head all the time when the kids are playing Minecraft.  They can do such weird things and you have to make a choice between reacting and potentially highlighting it, or ignoring and hoping they move onto something else.

After posting about their antics a few times, it became obvious that most (all?) Minecraft kids go through similar phases -blowing things up with TNT, killing villagers and arson.  Often when I post I'll get replies like "OMG I thought my kid was the only one!!"  This is the perfect setup for a comic!  Something that's relatable, but also a relief to find you're not alone! 😄

My original plan was to have both kids come up and show Fran something creepy, but then I had the idea of including the Minecraft fire assets around her.  I needed to switch to it just being Minecraft stuff, so I went through my goldmine of tweets.  I found some gems and made it a 3 panel comic, but it seemed unnecessarily long.  I also worried the Minecraft fire was confusing, so I took it out and made the speech bubbles themselves the fire around her.  I showed J both options and he liked the fire, so I put it back in.

I used a watercolory brush to get a similar type of effect that the original comic had.  It's always so fun mimicking styles! The last challenge was the speech bubble arrangement.  The bubbles were all from Vincent, so they had to be coming from the left and joined together, but the size of the text also meant they could only fit in certain places.  I wanted the villager one to be read first, but that would mean the bubble tails would have to crisscross in a weird way.  I fought it for a while trying to come up with a good solution.  If I had been setting up the panel myself I would have moved Fran over to the right, but she HAD to be in the middle for the parody to work.  In the end I posted it with the top 2 bubbles joined and the 3rd bubble with a separate tail.  Readers started assuming the 3rd bubble was from Cooper, so leaned in and reposted it with Cooper's special font.

After a hour I got dinged with a "community violation" from Webtoon -which had never happened before!  I assumed it was Cooper's line at the end, so I emailed back asking if it could be kept in because he's only doing it in Minecraft.  They got back to me straight away to tell me that that line wasn't actually the problem and it was because I'd referenced a copyrighted trademark too much!  I changed all references to MineCATS and I was good to go!  It was a useful warning though because it made me realize that Instagram would NOT be so cool!   They get really funny about stuff like that, even when it's meant in jest, so I preemptively removed the bubble from the IG version.  It's not as funny, but better than being shadowbanned! 😅