It'll cost ya....

The other week I was on my way home and decided to stop at a gas station to grab a protein bar and a water after a workout. I walk to the cooler and just happen to notice a man looking around as if he lost something or dropped something. When I get up to the counter he's there feverishly digging into pockets for change to buy his items. After he let's another customer go in front of him he steps in front of me to continue his cash scavenger hunt in his shirt and pants pockets. At this point I'm starting to get annoyed and just want him to leave, whether he leaves the items or just runs out with them.

I pay a little more attention to what's going on: he's buying 3 little novelty rings for his girls he has in the car and he's about 60 cents short.

Now I start to feel bad because of the semi-violent thoughts I was having about twenty seconds earlier. He's just trying to buy little gifts for his kids which I'm sure he promised to them and they're probably excited to receive when he exits the station. Just imagining the look of disappointment on their faces made me feel even worse (I don't know what they look like, but I imagined three adorable little girls with pig-tails and big doe eyes starting to tear up). So, I volunteered a dollar to pay whatever he was short. He instantly had a look of relief on his face and says: "Thank you so much, sir." To which I reply: "You're more than welcome."

After he leaves, the cashier gives me the leftover change and says: "What goes around comes around, huh?" As if me doing a good deed is going to net some good karma. What the cashier doesn't know is that karma has never paid off for me, besides it never really occurs to me to think past doing the right thing... I just know that I helped a man bring a little happiness to his kids, that's good enough. "Do unto others..."

Countdown!

I decided to add a countdown til my b-day:




Notice anything? (hint, check the other counters on the right)

slicin' n dicin'

Soooooooo.... I finally took a stab at parsing the first part of Allen's Darkness Aftermath script into comic page sized chunks. Currently: 28 pages. Now, that is approximately 6 pages more than a typical monthly comic book (Batman, etc.), but it is about 19 pages less than book 2 turned out to be. I haven't checked whether the division of the script was done by script sections or by content, but since Sally's book 2 was finished last spring, there isn't much I can do to match its size and there's only so much content that I'm willing to stretch over several pages of art.

There is a ton of content in the portion of the script Sally chose to tackle, which easily explains why it turned out to be such a large volume of work. The first part of the script seems bare in comparison, not due to quality but solely because so much of the story is taken up in the second book. Segmenting the story into pages is kind of a artistic/scientific process in and of itself, and it differs per person. I try to split dialogue/scenes in logical pages where one would expect to turn a page or place a 'surprising' occurence in the story on the next page so that the reader does not see it unless their line of sight changes pages. I could probably write an entire post on my personal ideas on script-to-page dissection, but I'm lazy.