idletry november update

hi everyone. why did it take so long to get out another update? because this scene was literally twice as long as usual.
this is also one of my least favorite scenes in the entire comic due to the fighting between the comedy and serious moments, mixed feedback on the reactions of the characters to jessie's powers (which will honestly always be a subjective sense of believability because they are reacting to a scenario for which there is no comparable scenario in reality), the kind of useless nature of jessie telling her family about her powers in terms of moving the plot forward but necessary inclusion for the sensibility, and maybe most of all, drawing the dead pet resurrection -- the bones sucked to draw, but the subject matter ended up being very... subconsciously triggering. it got easier to draw again once trouble wasn't the focus anymore.
but, that is to say, i really didn't enjoy drawing this scene and it did not help compounded with the length. i would not be surprised if it was edited extensively by the time the comic is completed... on the plus side, one of the next scenes was scrapped and the other is marked for "save until later when page count is clearer."

but i wanted to talk about continuity. because there were a lot of continuity snags during this as well. for example, i added some "snaps" to smooth out things like "where did she get the ability to fly from" even though it's pretty easy to just assume that she wrote something to make it so.
seemed like it was prettying up continuity -- and then i realized at the end of this scene, when the pen explodes, the ink wouldn't run out because of the gag that i wrote. it would keep trying to refill its open cartridge, so i drew it slowly oozing more ink onto the table. but ballpoint pens have a very thick ink that doesn't generally pour out once you remove the tip. the pen could be a rollerball pen, which has much thinner water-based ink, but rollerballs are generally more expensive and don't have that cheap "bic cristal" look to them. however, cheap gel pens, which are functionally rollerball pens, do... it's just a lot of stupid little quibbles like that.
i ended up just having the pen ooze ink endlessly anyway for thematic reasons; the script describes it as such: "The pen continues to bleed red ink onto the puzzle, unable to run dry, but she doesn't notice."
another example of stupid potential continuity conflicts here is that at the start of the scene with randall, i originally intended to have a cremation urn for trouble in emily's room in the background to allude to her. the panel happened to not really have enough space for it, but if i HAD been able to fit it, that would have conflicted with trouble's skeletal resurrection here. in my head, trouble walks in as animated dead remains because she just became alive again from where she was buried in the backyard. it would have gotten weirder, logically, if she'd been obliterated into ash, because she remembers being euthanized. why would she be resurrected at the age she died at if it was making her an entirely new body anyway? kind of a nitpicker's line of questioning, but one i would have had to wrestle with more if i had had enough room for an urn in a previous scene!

and then this scene's ending. it was rewritten like 3 times.

the first draft's ending:

Emily (partially interrupting): —then I have an idea: I couldn't use the powers, but you can write that other people have the same powers too, if you can do anything.

[Jessie nods with comprehension. She should seem eager to give her sister powers — there's no power-hungry hesitation as seen later. She starts to write, "Emily unlocks the same p-" The pen explodes. It blasts red ink all over the page in a puddle not unlike a puddle of blood. The burst is so violent that Jessie drops it instinctively.]

Emily: Aw, what?

Jessie (growling): Bitch! [reins in her snarl] I can get another pen.

Emily: I've got a feeling that wasn't coincidence. Uh. Don't worry about it.

[Emily looks disappointed.]

Emily: can you erase my student loans, though?

emily thinks she's lucid dreaming, so she wouldn't care about her student loans.

the second draft's ending:

[Jessie nods with comprehension. She should seem eager to give her sister powers — there's no power-hungry hesitation as seen later. She starts to write, "Emily unlocks the same p-" The pen explodes. It blasts red ink all over the page in a puddle not unlike a puddle of blood. It extends to part of the puzzle. The burst is so violent that Jessie drops it instinctively.]

Emily (taunting): Ha-ha, not omnipotent.

Jessie (growling, at the notebook): Bitch! [reins in her snarl] I can get another pen.

Evelyn: Jessie. [Evelyn touches Jessie's paw] Is this why you've been in your room so much lately?

Jessie: Y-yeah, I was figuring it out, how to make the powers work. [new panel, ears pinned, desperate for mother's approval] I can help us all in, HUGE ways with the notebook.

Evelyn: Sweetheart... you didn't need to do [sort of disdainful] all of. This. For me to feel proud of you. [new panel] For all that notebook can do, it didn't help you spend any time with us. [pointing at Jessie's head] You're stuck up there instead of being here with us. Why don't you sit and help solve this puzzle?

Jessie (lifting her notebook away from it): I mean, there's ink on it now, though.

[Evelyn observes the puzzle with an odd sense of regret and pity.]

Evelyn: That's fine. We can still solve it. All of the pieces still fit together, right?

[Jessie's ears twist with distaste: a truth she doesn't want to be true. She would rather not have to look at the puzzle she ruined.]

Evelyn (patting table): Spend some time with us. [cut to Emily] I don't think Em's going to be much help now anyway.....

[Jessie's tail wags cautiously. The scene ends on a shot of her notebook.]

Jessie: Right. Sure, okay, Meem.

in this iteration, evelyn plays a more active role in trying to dissuade jessie from focusing on the powers. in the final ending sketched out here, i introduced adam to just like... show the audience he exists, and to quickly whisk jessie away out of the scene. evelyn could be believably flabbergasted for the few moments it takes for jessie to leave, and the already long scene would end much sooner.
relatedly, introducing adam into the scene kind of raises the question: jessie entered from the front door -- we know this because the sliding door of the backyard is closed until emily opens it (side note: i'll also have to keep track of the open door through the scene after she opens it because drawing emily closing it kind of just turned the composition of the pages after into a trainwreck).
however, adam can't be in the backyard because he would have noticed their dead dog rising from her grave while gardening? question mark because that sentence is just absurd to me? but that means he was gardening in the front. so how did jessie not notice him and show him the powers first? in actuality, my mother loves gardening and there have been more times than i can count where i just have not noticed her tucked in a corner or on the ground burying something even when i'm looking for her. if i were being unforgiving i could still kind of turn my nose up at the idea, though.

some other continuity things i had to decide on, and still am planning to rework:

• it has to be early summer when jessie and shiloh meet, which means it's late spring right now, so it could be believably warm or cool. i decided to dress the characters in long sleeves to imply that it was chillier that day to make jessie's choice to wear a hoodie less odd, but since it's later spring, it probably wouldn't be that cold, plants seen growing in the front yard wouldn't have been growing until it was warmer, adam wouldn't be working outside if it were that cold, evelyn probably wouldn't have sent jessie outside if it were that cold, etc. now i need to redraw emily's outfit to be less winter-y.

• evelyn's outfit specifically i had to decide if it would be the same as the one she was seen wearing in the scene previous to this one, because it implies whether jessie decided to go home immediately to tell her family after discovering these powers or keeping them to herself for a couple of days. evelyn is wearing the same shirt here to imply that jessie told them on the same day she discovered the powers. she's at an odd but fitting sweet spot where she seems to have been first and foremost absorbed in experimenting with the powers for herself for a few hours, giving the family members enough time to settle into doing their own thing.

• the puzzle... my god. i rotated it to get the pieces to stay relatively the same shape. but i ended up editing the first panel of this scene to look more similar to the "re-unsolved" puzzle. the first shot of the puzzle needs to be a decent match cut (need to work on that) to the last page's last panel, but it also needed to look like it was solved through natural logical decisions people would make while solving a puzzle, but it also needed to look enough like the "re-unsolved" puzzle's layout to not be instantly painfully obviously different if you flip back to look between the two versions. however, the SECOND version of the puzzle needed to have the rose more or less completely "solved" and couldn't have the area around the piece evelyn is putting down in the first version's first shot.

• on page 68 jessie's notebook kind of disappears for a minute so i have to fix that without interrupting the shot of the second version of the unsolved puzzle -_-;

anyway i'm really sleepy because i took some melatonin a while ago and it's late, so i'm just gonna end this ramble here. there's a ton of decision fatigue that can go into the process of making comics. even though the comic's universe is constructed to have continuity errors as part of their reality, this scene in particular is like, "hey, look at the puzzle! pay attention to the details! the fact that it isn't consistent is meaningful!" and undermines that.