Halloween Special 2021 – Chapter 8, Act 2, Strip 45

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Even if it’s currently still three days, actually – but that’s just how the update calendar worked out, and I still felt that three days early was better than posting this one on Monday, one day after Halloween. XD

As for the idea behind the strip…well, it was kind of obvious actually. Since I’ve just introduced the Coin-Monster, it was bound to get the leading role in this strip, since everyone else has done it before already.

And what kind of a nightmare scenario could you spin around money most readily? Inflationary fears, of course. Inflation still has a powerful grip on the psyche of a lot of people, even if it’s not been much of a problem in the Western world for many decades – so just imagine how torturous such thoughts must be for some being that is literally money. Inflation isn’t just threatening its wealth, it’s threatening its very substance. Nobody like to consider their own life cheap, but if you’re money the value of your life is a matter of public knowledge, down to a fraction. One shudders to think of it.*

The rest of the crew is only watching events, but still shudder…not so much due to the sights or thoughts of inflationary events than due to the cool autumn air and their particular choices in Halloween costumes. Coming from a beach episode, a Free! Iwatobi Swim Club theme seems like a thrifty and practical choice, since it’s hard to find any sort of costume that would be easier to pull off. But October is a cool month in both Canada as well as Japan, so even the ambiguity of their geographical location isn’t protecting the team from one particular consequence of that choice…

More on Monday.

*Fortunately for myself, I’m completely resilient to inflationary fears – neither being money nor having any. XD

4 Replies to “Halloween Special 2021 – Chapter 8, Act 2, Strip 45”

  1. Typo: “I’m drowning IN what I love the most!”

    Also panel 4 must be a VERY traumatic experience because his um… facial features shifted 45 degrees (the eyes were AT the square-hole edges, they’re BETWEEN the square-hole edges in that panel). Unless that’s just a feature of the monster and its eyes/mouth are ALWAYS the same orientation no matter how the coin-body turns.

    Also also you regressed from modern times again. The coin is reading a physical newspaper/magazine. XD

    1. Ah, thanks for catching that typo, I’ve corrected it. =)

      And, yeah, you could say that that’s a feature of the monster – mostly because I use a 3d-model of a zeni coin for its body, to save me the effort of having to draw the coin over and over again. (And it can never hurt to have a 3d-model of a zeni coin, anyway…) And then I draw the facial features on top of that. Theoretically, I could take some care to make sure the coin is oriented the right way up when I place and manipulate the 3d-model…but that would involve extra effort, when the whole point was to save me some. XD So, yeah, expect to see that error reoccurring…

      That’s true, but here I kind of did it on purpose, or at least was aware of it – because I wanted to show the coin reading the Financial Times, specifically, and that would have been much more difficult to depict with an e-paper. XD

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