Broken Seal – Chapter 7, Act 3, Strip 29

So K’ip has broken the seal…but, in view of the somewhat controversial nature of that, I’ve decided to replace a direct depiction of the goings-on with an easy-to-understand metaphorical depiction. K’ip might not mind the public relations problem connected to clubbing a seal, but I do for him…

And then he ups the ante, in terms of controversy, by incorporating some seal fur into his outfit. Which, from the beginning, raises the question how he even managed to extract fur from an elephant seal…and then goes on to raise questions of an ethical/moral nature. Since the seal fur cannot verbalize those questions, Si’ri does so in its stead. Wearing fur (or leather) is a very controversial subject in real life, of course, but in a fantasy context it is normally considered acceptable…but not when you’re as smug about it as K’ip, which immediately sends it back to controversial territory. You can side with either K’ip or Si’ri here at your convenience, I’m not taking sides.

But at this point I can elaborate on the editing problem I mentioned a while ago…specifically, back when K’ip’s tunic suddenly had a fur collar in this strip. As of today, you know where that collar came from, but why did it already show up before he acquired it? Essentially, in the first week of February I noticed to my horror that the calendar I had used for scheduling was off by a week in January…due to that ‘extra’ week, the Valentine’s Day strip was scheduled for what really was February 21st. Staring at that mess intently, I realized to my relief that the strips in question did allow for rearrangement without too much of a problem. I moved the Valentine’s Day strip to its proper location on Feb. 14th…the strip with the copper dragon connects to it, so it had to move to Feb. 11th…and then I created a new filler strip for February 7th (this one). And that allowed me to move three strips that were originally scheduled ahead of the copper dragon strip to after the Valentine’s Day strip.

The only major inconsistency caused by that was the fur collar, which K’ip originally had for two strips after the one where he acquired it (today’s strip)…due to the move, these two strips were now ahead of the strip where he got the collar. But when I was about to edit the collar out in those two strips…I realized that the whole thing is actually quite authentically “B-movieish” – a typical editing goof, where scenes are re-ordered without reshooting, leading to continuity faults. That’s the beautiful thing about a B-movie-themed comic – you can pass your bugs off as features! XD

More on Mon…uh, Thursday.