The joke is a little surreal, but I just love it, so in it goes.

Artistically, I tried to put a lot more effort into shading in this page. While my shading usually looks OK, I don’t tend to think too hard about how the light actually falls across the character from scene to scene. I tend to just put shading in the ‘usual’ places, and tend not to have big blocks of shadow, as these tend to be noticed more when they’re wrong. I am very pleased with the results of the extra effort and hopefully it was noticeable. If not, ah well, it makes me happy. Now I look harder Jayden’s hair looks shorter than it did last time…. um…. shush.  I am still quite pleased with the effect I used to simulate tea granules. It just looks right to me.

On another artistic note, that genuinely is Howick Hall and that really is what the current Earl Grey looks like, or near enough for my writing style. Thanks to the internet there really is not any excuse for getting this sort of thing wrong. However that room may or may not appear inside Howick Hall, I couldn’t find any photographs of what the building looks like inside, so I just got a random image. It would fit the type though.

Despite appearances, panel 2 does not violate the internal geography of the house, it’s just very odd perspective. Trust me.

If you’re wondering where Kat went, fear not, that will be explained in due time. Originally Crusader’s line was  “My dear little lapsang souchong, sweet assams, the Dar Jeeling!” But when I drew the tea caddy I realised it could only contain one tea, not three, so I chose the three varieties of tea that make up Twinings English Breakfast Tea, Ceylon, Assam and Kenya tea. I personally prefer pure Assam, but English Breakfast Tea is good too.  As a final note on the writing, that line by Earl Grey’s wife was added so late in the game she doesn’t even get to appear in the comic itself. I just felt that last panel needed a little extra punch.
A punchline, if you will.

Ha ha ha, punny.

Have I ever updated on the last day of the month before? Of course I have, every October, but I still think it is a novelty. If you have OCD and nothing better to do, why don’t you go count the number of times that’s happened, against the number of times it would have happened if I updated every Monday like I am supposed to.

I’d thank you. In the form of a picture of your choice. Comment below with the answer and what you want a picture of and I’ll email it to you. (I reserve the right to the image itself)

So to the page itself. I wrote this page, and the storyline it kicks off, back in good old 2011, sometime in the late spring, I think, but maybe early autumn, when I was consuming vast quantities of tea. Given the cost of tea is about 5p/cup, 30p with milk, I drink an awful lot of it as a starving student and Crusader, being the only British character whose point of view is easily relatable, has inherited this trait of mine. I like my tea hot, strong enough to spread on toast, and sweet as a stolen kiss. Presumably Crusader does too.

Anyway, this script is the second time Crusader has suddenly bolted up in bed (have you ever tried doing that? It’s hard) but this time we get to see a bit more of his room (and his hair is less sticky-up-y). Does anyone remember when one of his defining character traits was a love of anime? I wonder if he grew out of that, as I did, or if he just doesn’t talk about it anymore. Or perhaps, more sinisterly, is there simply less anime worth watching out there? Ah well.

Artistically I feel this page is hit and miss. Kat in panel 1 is one of my favourite times I have ever seen her, but in panel 2 is one of her worst (not technically speaking, but it is wrong in a way that irks me). Jayden’s hair is almost back to proper length, as I would expect by now. It’s been growing for five months now, so it should be almost a full flowing head of hair again. I am not sure how long this storyline will be, so I put Jayden back into her usual clothing (for the modern era), as experimenting with interesting Jayden clothes could result in the Adrian of May cursing the Adrian of April for all its worth as I struggle with finicky embroidery. I tried to colour Kat and Jayden’s speech bubbles in panel 4 with easily identifiable colours (their shirts) but I think it went wrong, to my muddy eyes they look almost the same, and blur into the background at that. Is this the first time the kitchen has had upper cabinets? I think it might be.

Crusader’s tea chest here was originally meant to be much larger, with many compartments for different teas and future scripts hint at that. Unfortunately I forgot about that when it came to draw this page, and the box is much smaller than it should be. Oh well, to the rewrite room! I do like it though, with the mother of pearl-like ornamentation on the lid, and the fine wood grain. If I was the kind of man to go to antiques fairs, and I am not yet, I would probably try to acquire one just like it. This is also I think the first time I have used a texture in this way, just pasting it straight in, instead of doing block colours and applying the texture as a more subtle overlay.

Ah, been a while since a long worded artist comment, enjoy every word!

I was experimenting with different brushes to get the burning effect on the walls. In the end I was not pleased with the results. There was a brush I used during the Computer Returns story arc whose effect I really liked, but I think I picked up the wrong one for this page.

But on the other hand, I really like this page. I like the acting on Hannah, and Smic. I think this is another view into their relationship worth seeing.

Also it blurs the lines of reality a bit. So yay for that.

Can you believe that page I linked to was 5o pages ago? It feels like no time at all… and yet eons at the same time.

I finished this page 2 weeks ago and forgot to put it up today. Doh. Oh well, it is up now. Just late.

Explosions are hard.

Not much to be said, I am quite pleased with that shading. The script just wrote itself almost instantly a few weeks ago and I knew it had to be made.

Small strip, small rant. Rate and comment please

This comic was inspired by me wanting to get Jayden a new suit. It went through a number of variations (which included one script which was mostly Jayden talking about her boobs) before it ended up here. I like this one best. It reminds me of this page  which was all about showing the same issue from various angles. It’s something I wish I had more patience to do, but it does take a long time to shade and colour that many characters.

This ends with one of my favourite jokes which I have long been trying to weasel into a script. I love it when characters just escape like that. I also find it amusing Third appears to be browsing for clothing in the woman’s section, but maybe that was just to get ahold of the attendant. This page was actually drawn after the next three pages coming up. There should now be J&C pages enough to run until the end of April. Yay.

Also apparently Crusader’s shirt contains no yellow. Curse my inferior, dalton-esque eyes!

Note that for once it was someone other than Smic being mocked for being hopelessly out of date.

Well, that wraps up our little Valentine’s Day storyline. It only took six weeks. Urgh, my output rate at the moment stinks…

This page was produced during a very stressful time and drawn only during the snatches of time I could steal for myself from a myriad of conflicting draws on my time. It didn’t help it was a very complex page to stage, as I have never before drawn anything like two people arriving home drunk and having a conversation as they go to bed. I broke a few cardinal rules of staging (characters change swap the side of the frame they occupy, twice…) but I think it works.

Speaking of drinking, we get to learn a bit more about how Jayden and Third are when they’re drunk than we did at the fourth anniversary celebrations. Jayden seems to be a fall-down drunk, as she’s usually leaning against something, while Third seems to be more of the angry gesticulations type, though he might not be as drunk as Jayden… then again… a bottle of whisky should push anyone into almost oblivious drunkeness.  I got scared that I hadn’t successfully conveyed that they were drunk, so I added the Questionable Content drunk bubbles for good measure.

It is rare I do a storyline involving Jayden and Third and no-one else. Crusader usually is involved, but this time I was glad to get rid of him. I think we learn a lot about them both, though that was not my intention. One thing that I noticed looking back on it, which was not intentional, was that Third very frequently avoids eye contact with people in this storyline. I am not sure what it entails, but I do note with interest that avoiding eye contact is a common symptom of people with Asperger’s syndrome. Just something to ponder, as I said, it was not intentional.

Finally, I hope that Third’s face in panel 6 lives on in your nightmares for some time.

I had been the media officer for two years, sat on the society committee and produced two gigabytes of posters, flyers and leaflets promoting our society and shows. It had become a not insignificant part of my life. Part of my way of defining myself was to say Adrian, Bangor Comedy Media Officer, and that’s no longer true. I caught myself on Thursday thinking about the publicity I would do for a show we have in April, likely to be our largest of the year, and realised that was no longer my decision to make. I had been passed over for the new Media Officer. I’ve given them all my files, and all my advice, and will probably be lending a helping hand this year and next, but it will be their decisions, not mine, which will control the future publicity of the society.

The future is rapidly approaching with the speed of an angry train and the loss of the position of Media Officer is an indication of that. I will graduate from university this summer, and will be moving back to Oxfordshire. My educational and academic life will be over and I will be forced to enter the workforce, a frightening concept. While I have worked before it has only ever been part time, or for a short period with a clear end in sight. The concept of having to work forever and ever the same job for at least twice as long as all my life up until this point is not one which makes me smile.

Although there is an option for having something somewhat more pleasant. Writing. Some of you may not know it, but I am an avid writer. I have written 5 novels and two plays in my spare time, I’m an accomplished comedian and have many more projects in various states of unfinished. Given the free time of unemployment with the focussed mind of a man who still lives in his parents house, I could be churning out scripts, short stories and novels at a thoroughly unprecedented rate. If I could land a career in writing, in any industry, publishing, television, radio, what have you, I would probably be much more content to give up 40 hours of my life each week, or more if I really enjoyed the job.

For many that would be a near insurmountable task, but I think you will find I am up to it. It is to be my goal, for at least a year after graduation, to get a job, any job, where I can use my creativity in such a manner.

And Jayden and Crusader will be coming along for the ride of course. I can’t escape them, even during the ‘fallow’ periods of Jayden and Crusader when no pages are being made the Jayden and Crusader characters are constantly around in my life. Whether they are suggesting stories to me or making funny comments about the world, they’re there, and adorn just about every spare scrap of paper I own.

However the dedication required of me when I am looking for work, trying to break into a career, might be somewhat more than allows for Jayden and Crusader. I am not making any prophetations of doom without good cause but it is a sad possibility I see in the horizon, the possibility I will have to put Jayden and Crusader on hiatus.  Hiatus is something it has been on before. There was a period of 3 months in 2009 where Jayden and Crusader was on hiatus, but this time it would be different. For one thing, I had the Space Opera to run while we were on hiatus. It might have been fluffy, silly filler, but it was still something. I don’t have anything like that to run this time. For another I’d have no certainty when I’d be able to return to the Jayden and Crusader household. Any job in the creative industry is draining, whether I am a novelist locked in a room with a type writer or a comedian on stage every night, I would be tired and exhausted when it came to do a comic. Updates of once a month would probably be an overly optimistic rate. Therefore it would be a tempting possibility to put the Jayden and Crusader characters on a bus for a while…

Of course, I can’t escape them. Jayden and Crusader, Smic and Hannah, Third and Kat, they’ve somehow grabbed me hard by the brain and won’t let go. I do Jayden and Crusader to stay sane, to make me happy, sometimes even just as a coping mechanism to stop thinking about bad news. But there might come a time when I have to give up the dream of a regularly updating webcomic for a little while. I mean, I’m currently a student and I can’t even get out 1 comic a week!

If you had said to me at this time 3 years ago, when I put Jayden and Crusader on haitus for the first time, that in three years time I would be; living in Wales, an accomplished comedian, considering a career in professional writing and be considering putting Jayden and Crusader to one side when I get a job I would probably have laughed derisively at you.

Oh, the times. They are a-changing.

And now because that was all rather depressing, here is a panorama of my university in the sunshine.

It’s actually almost a month ago, but it was the same sort of weather.

This comic might explain why Third never seemed to have a large role in the space opera. I hope it is clear that every piece of glass shattered. This script kept wanting to balloon to seven or eight panels and I had to keep pulling it back into six. I don’t do eight panellers anymore. They tire me out.

In yet more nods towards Questionable Content, the bar tender in this comic is modelled after Wil. At first it was subconscious, but I realised as I added a bowler hat that it had to be Wil. The bar they’re at was fun to design, and I enjoyed writing up all the little signs in all the spare spaces. Also there’s that student from Third’s class. She’s there because she’s fun to draw.

And no other reason.