This might be the first in-canon story comic to reference George’s hair cut changing from time to time.

I changed it from his original spiked pompadour to the Skywalker inspired ‘do in a 4th wall breaking strip… but I don’t recall mentioning the other changes I’ve done to the Skywalker or back to the spike. I could be wrong as it’s been a little while since I’ve gone back through and read all of the archives.

But for those of you missing having zombies in Zombie Roomie… this arc is for you! There’ll be more zombies in this storyline than there’s ever been before!

And we’re moving right along…

I’ve been conflicted lately. Not because I’m not enjoying doing the comic… I just feel like I’m not addressing popular culture happenings like I had been. We’ve had the Avengers and Diablo 3 coming out and while both are huge geek moments I would normally do something about– I haven’t mentioned either in the comic.

I’m too busy working with the story of Zombie Roomie to bother including that stuff right now.

I know a part of it is due to the way I’m approaching the writing of the comic since the hiatus/reboot… but I kind of miss the goofy references/etc. I’m sure eventually I’ll be able to seamlessly weave the two types of comics together, but that’s just not how I’m doing it now.

I just wanted to let you guys in on my weird brain goings on. Especially since I had been asked whether I was going to include something about both the Avengers and Diablo… I’m just not there yet guys.

One of the things that you guys will start to see is John coming out of his shell as we move along with the story.

Living under the constant threat of sudden but inevitable betrayal and possibly being eaten really tends to weigh heavily on a guy.

Along with John and George is a new human character named Greg. We’ll start seeing more characters that started hanging out with the cast during the downtime in the coming weeks. It’ll be fun to explore who they are and why they’re part of Zombie Roomie now instead of earlier.

So, we’ve jumped ahead to the present day.

Last we left our intrepid “heroes”… they were still back in January following the events of the Year without a Santa Claus arc.

I’m having fun coming up with things that have occurred in the interim. Small things like John cutting his hair and George not always shaving… to bigger things that are pretty big changes to different character traits and playing against established traits that we’ll eventually see.

George not shaving is a temporary thing to show he’s been down in the dumps due to his current circumstance. That’s not a look he’ll keep up as I’m not entirely keen on it. John’s hair is close to where I want it, but I still have to play around a little. Maybe his head shape is a little off or something… but as I have more practice with it, I’ll get it “right”.

I have wanted to go back and update the font for a long while… as you see, I have changed fonts and moved to an all UPPER CASED font for the comic’s dialogue. Back when I started I used the Mixed case of a different font. I also had word balloons that left a lot to be desired.

While I’m doing this editing, in very rare cases I’m changing a little (and I do mean little) of the art. The biggest thing I’ve changed can be seen in the above image where I changed the door’s location in panel one. When I had started Zombie Roomie, I had thought about giving the guys a door that was on the outside of their apartment… like they had a duplex or something. But I quickly changed my mind to have them live in a multiple story apartment building.

More frequently than that style of art change is when I change some small color issue. For the first few weeks of comics I had John wearing almost turquoise jeans… I changed to a more denim blue and now all of his jeans will be the same color. I’m also fixing Zoey’s eyes, almost all of Jamal’s colors in his early strips, etc. I want to make sure the early comics reflect the colors that I’ve settled on as I’ve gotten into a groove with Zombie Roomie.

There’s also a bit of recompositing going on. I originally had really tall and skinny panels, but just before the one year anniversary I changed to the current panel ratio. I want to have the comics all fit in the same size so I’m taking the art from the comics and repositioning it into the new size.

That also allows me to make the comics all the new size of 1000 pixels wide. The very first comics were around 935 pixels and after the first year I moved to 970. In the last few weeks I’ve moved up to 1000 pixels and all the edited comics will end up being that as well… when I get to them.

Other than a strange George Lucas like desire to go back and edit my old work… there is an actual reason for this. I’m getting the files ready for the first book of Zombie Roomie. I want the reading experience to be consistent. The less than stellar word balloons, the changing fonts and cases, and the colors changing during the course of the book would be far more noticeable than they were if you were reading the comic as the strips were going up each update. The art changes are to keep things consistent.

I’m not doing the totally insane thing of redrawing the old strips… I’m just tweaking them.

I just wanted to let you guys know what was going on in case you were interested and/or you were going through the archives and noticed the drastic change when you got to the old strips after the updated ones.

Yes, this is completely stupid.

I know.

Since Jack is a wolfman, I thought it was kind of clever for him to have an issue with Coors Light.

I’m also sure I’m not the first to have thought of it, I just thought it’d be a nice joke to end the week of heavy stuff with George and Zoey’s relationship. Plus, Andrew really pushed for me to do the joke.

If you remember, I said this was going to be the end of this arc. That’s true.

I also realize that this is a strange place to end it as lots of stuff is up in the air. Where are George and Zoey at in their relationship? etc.

Tomorrow deals with Francis and Jack.

On Monday, we jump forward in time a bit. Because of the Santa arc and this last arc only taking place in a night and the day after… we’re still in January in the comic’s timeline. We’re going to jump ahead to the current day and we’ll be picking up and seeing where the various characters are at and what has changed in the meantime.

My decision to de-zombify George was a pretty bold one, in my opinion, and I want to keep up with that kind of storytelling so jumping ahead and letting the chips fall where they would should be fun. It will be fun to write at least… I hope you’re all willing to come along for the ride.

Okay, so now we’re all caught up. Zoey and Lizzy are back from their trip to Fivebucks Coffee and George isn’t hiding in the bathroom anymore either.

We’ve got tomorrow’s strip to put a bow on this arc.

Then I’m doing a goofy monster strip for Friday.

Monday starts a new bit.

It’s been established that Drew has been using John’s body for sexy times… it’s just now that John is having to wonder what form those sexy times are taking of late.

I realize it’s silly that Drew would also be naked… but go with me on it.

Today is my buddy Andrew’s (I am ARG!) one year anniversary of doing comics. If you’re not reading ARG!, why not? Give it a try.

So in the end, I decided to move the story along instead of a goofy monster strip for today. Said goofy monster strip is on the books for Friday.

When I came up with the idea for this week’s strips, I had the silly plan for today’s third panel… I like doing the dropped out backgrounds dealy since I have the white space around my comic. So, having George peer around the curtain which in this case doubles as a defacto panel border… I just had to do it.

I was also pondering combining today’s and tomorrow’s strips into a double-sized… but while they tie directly to each other… they have separate beats so it’d be kinda weird. So I decided to just spread them out across the two days– which is much easier to justify with the five day a week schedule.