Making of "Youtubaleplex"

Every October I like to do a "What if the family were _______? " comic.  Last year was robots and the year before zombies.  This year was the turn of the aliens!

I'd come up with the basics of this one last year -some sort of cloning malfunction that resulted in a million Coops and Vinces, but I hadn't figured out how or why. Reading through my notes, it struck me that they could be fighting over something, but instead of cloning IT they clone more of them to fight!

I roughed it out quickly with old linework of them fighting -giving them all 3 eyes to denote aliens.  Once I could see it was going to work, it was time for the fun bit; designing them!

It's much easier to design new characters on their own sheet than within the confines of the panels.  I restricted my color pallet to Invader Zim type colors to give them an otherworldly feel.

The first panel was a little crowded, so I reworked the conversation so Fran didn't have to appear until panel 2 and when she did, we get a good view of her to understand the alien-ness.  I ran all the words of the script through a thesaurus to find more clunky, alieny sounding versions.

A lot of what came next was layout organization -making sure the replicator machine was obvious and the clones didn't overlap in strange ways.  It was hard, but fun! :)

I did a little easter egg of making the screen of the Youtubaleplex look like an alien version of Ryan's Toy Review (a popular YouTube Kids show) complete with tentacled parody of the channel logo:

I posted to Webtoon and some people were a little thrown by what Fran was instructing them to replicate.  I don't think it helps that the eye naturally wanders to the last panel and you are primed for them to clone themselves. While I was writing this post and looking back at the earlier drafts, I realized that I could make it clearer by having the replicator screen show 1 Youtubaleplex becoming 2 Youtubaleplexes!  This was an annoying revelation at this point because I'd already scheduled all the posts! Urgh.  I went back in and updated it everywhere.  I think it was the right choice -nothing worse than a good joke that doesn't land quite right!