You never know what you’ll find in The Nest’s temple of doom…
I was digging for something to read on the messy bookshelf next to my computer Friday when something caught my eye that seemed out of place. Just from the tiny portion that was visible, I could tell it was one of my comic strip master drawings I made back when I drew ESN The Comic…. but I kept those all in a folder, and made sure to add the latest one as soon as I scanned it to my computer. Why was this one loose?
What happens when things get loose.
That was immediately answered when I noticed the date I had signed on it…. 9/21/17, or September 21, 2017 for those of you who read dates backwards. I knew the final strip I drew was dated September 14, 2017 (but posted on September 21 because I was a week behind at the time). Apparently, I had gotten started on the next strip… but hadn’t even gotten around to scanning it to my computer during my “weekend” of the 28th-29th. Before my next days off rolled around, my original computer I bought when I moved here in 2009 would bite the dust on October 2nd… and the combination of being now two weeks behind, not having access to my beloved old school MS Paint program, and just general disinterest in the tedious process involved anymore would officially kill off the beloved strip for good.
So for the lost Comic #282 of 9/21/17, all I have is this….
For the life of me, I can’t piece together what the idea was just from the blanks! And that pisses me off!!!!
I can tell I had set it in Mecca’s break room, as Lil, ES and Robbie (L-R) can be seen sitting at the table, with their boss (who was called…. The Boss) standing behind them. They’re obviously collecting money for something, the boss doesn’t like what he hears (the “triangle” in the second panel I believe was to be three speech bubbles) and goes on a lecture that makes the other three groan. And then the boss cheerfully digs in his wallet as ES and the gang seem to relent about… something. Argh! What was on my mind at the time!?!?
You can also see how little detail I actually drew on paper. Most of the finer details (Like the trio’s work badges, Robbie’s glasses, and the lines that strayed too far) were always added/deleted/cleaned up in Paint. New Paint and Photoshop couldn’t do clean lines without artifacts, which is why old Paint’s loss was the biggest blow in my continuation of the strip.
You coulda asked me to help with the Paint!
But, there’s something for your boring Sunday morning. A lost piece of Evil Squirrel’s Nest history! And sadly, an unfinished one that will likely remain an unsolved mystery. And if you were interested in how I drew these comics, check out this post from 8 years ago!
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
Gosh – that would be an interesting contest ! Your devoted audience finished off the comic by adding the dialogue. HAHAHA. I bet you’re glad you found this though since it was (or would have been) the last comic.
Pam
I don’t even remember starting a comic that would go on to be unfinished! There’s a LOT of empty dialogue in this one… so there’d be lots of spaces to fill. It’d be a nifty contest of whatever idea, but I don’t want to constrict entries that much…
What a great find! For me, it’s like finding a scrap of a story and trying to figure out where I was going with it!
There’s times I thumb back through my old comics here and come across a completed one I don’t even remember doing. That I’d even started an unfinished comic was a shock to me… it’s no wonder I can’t remember what story I had to go along with it!
My thoughts ran in similar lines to ‘Spoiled Cat’ there. Host a challenge to “provide the dialogue or write the caption’ and see what folks come up with. And as to the death of MS Paint (I never embraced Paint, Photoshop has been my metier all along… even Corel’s (which is now dead) Photoshop version didn’t pique my interesting much) , my condolences on your loss. There is an option in Photoshop, under the “Layers” menu, called “Matting”. If you set that to maximum (up to 200 pixels), it takes care of those pesky artifacts that one finds when doing ‘hand drawn’ line art. Of course since you’ve retired ‘the Strip o’ Awesomeness’ , those suggestions are moot. But if you ever decide to venture there again, well you have a tool against messy lines. Think about the contest/challenge. It might prove really amusing!
I’d have to completely relearn everything, right down to the actual hand drawing again. I don’t know why Paint had to get all fancy… but it had that simplicity that Photoshop just didn’t. PS was great for adding cool effects and a lot of my background gags that became signatures… but it was too hard to get it to just draw a simple line!
I’m sure it was something edgy and inciteful…
And I’m sure you’ll find that it’s the people who read dates backwards (and miss out zeros) who would write “21/09/2017” as “9/21/17” heh heh.
Hmmmm…. I think one of them lost some time on their punch card due to a backwards date and the boss was now having to pay them out of pocket for the lost wages. Yes, that was it!
It’s weird how much the characters look alike without color! I guess it’s not really since they’re all squirrels but in the colored version they all look so different I never noticed the similarity in their shapes. I can’t believe it’s been that long since you stopped doing the comic!
It’s sad when updates and “upgrades” ruin things you used to enjoy doing. The same thing happened to me with photography. First Sony completely changed the way my camera uploaded photos to my computer and then Google killed off Picasa, the only photo editing program I’ve ever used. Snapseed changed and today I discovered that Dropbox has changed and I can’t seem to download my photos from it anymore. Sometimes change really sucks!
I use the same basic “template” for all my characters. Outside of their fur color, the hair and accessories were about the only ways to tell them apart. Lil’s easy to spot because of her spiky hair, and then there’s Robbie’s “mask,” and the boss was a dog so he had the droopy ears. ES could be an unfinished version of just about anyone except Buster and Rainbow Donkey!
Upgrades suck so much because we found ways to make use of the old stuff, and that’s always what gets taken away in the name of NEW and IMPROVED! Photobucket, where I’d been storing my images for over a decade, has morphed from being bad to outright unusable unless you want to pay them to remove the ten billion ads that pop up and make it literally impossible to do anything with. Thankfully, most of what I’d want to keep over there is already uploaded to my blog…