Making of "Boldly Going"

J really throws himself into imagination play with the kids.  One day he was flying around a X-Wing when one of them tried shooting him down with Skye in her little pink helicopter, which he took umbrage with.  I'd been trying to think of how to turn it into a strip ever since.

The original Comictober prompt was "Alien" but I suggested changing repeats of last year into similar words, so it became "Encounter".  I still wanted to make it about aliens and I brainstormed and started messing about with Star Trek ideas.  I realized that if I changed the X-Wing to the Enterprise, I could set it up like a real Next Gen episode and make the reveal funnier.

I sketched it out with some photos for the ships.  I incorrectly remembered it being the Air Patroller, but J said it was actually Skye, which made it MUCH funnier!

I kept being unsatisfied with the last panel and changing it up.  J had suggested them being angry at each other, but the tension between them was making me uncomfortable.  After getting all the way to flat colors, I ended up redrawing the whole thing.  I felt the closer camera made it look a bit more intimate and Dad Cat's remarks less cold.

I had to do a TON of research for reference pics for this one!  Statues are often one of the best things to Google because you can get a lot of angles and they've done the job of simplifying things for you!

I discovered after posting that I'd made a mistake with my starship reference pictures.  I had wondered why it looked fatter in the side view, but had written it off as a weird perspective thing.  Apparently the 2nd one is actually an ambassador class ship.  Oops!  I'll blame it on Dad Cat's imagination! 😅

Here was the reference pic I used for the bonus panel:

The bonus panel initial sketch: