I’m fairly certain that if I called anyone I know “snookums” they’d kick me in a particularly sensitive location on my body.

I’m hardly down on love, mind you. Quite the contrary! I’m fond enough of it to be actively & happily polyamorous. But let’s be honest with ourselves, one and all: When we were newly fallen we probably annoyed everybody. Nobody dodges that bullet.

At any rate: Happy Valentine’s Day, folks.

Right off the bat I’d like to invite the purists to bugger off.  Panel 2 had to flow the way it did or risk a third word-bubble layer with more confusing indicators. Frell that.

I apologize for going so long between Rusty appearances. I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Also: Yes, I’m well past the tail end of the trend for mocking Twilight. This is the guy who made an “ayePhone” joke three years after the iPhone was introduced, remember?

…

One of the things Webcomic tends to do to me is to pick a random misplaced thumbnail when I upload a new comic. I always have to check the thumbnail settings before I post; it generates all of them correctly, so I just have to copy/paste the relevant part of the filename and all is well. Since nobody else can reproduce the bug, I’m sort of stuck with it. Such is life, I suppose.

I mention this mainly because today’s random selection was… the thumbnail from an earlier comic during which Rusty was eating something.

Huh. I think he’s the only duck I’ve shown eating in a comic. How odd.

Admit it: You’ve missed this sort of thing.

At least a little bit.

(Right?)

Mostly this just was an excuse to use one of the new ducks I’ve picked up lately.

Oh, who am I kidding? This was an excuse to use Bob again. I just love a character that I don’t have to write actual dialog elements for…

It’s the least I could do for one of my biggest, best fans.

Okay, don’t you all go clamoring at once for similar treatment, now…!

I think I spent more time setting up the travel-Settlers-of-Catan game board than I spent shooting the frames. Partly this is because I wanted to make sure that the game board reflected an actual, probable game situation: Peter just placed a settlement right where the (as-yet-unnamed) rabbit wanted to go. Also, Peter has the longest road placard, worth two points, placing him only two points from winning the game.

Yes, I put way too much thought into something that nobody would actually pay attention to.

…

I faced three challenges in assembling this comic, only one of which was externally imposed. One of the roommates suggested a Star Wars theme, so I ran with that. I wracked my brain for a while and came up with the “let the Wookie win” scene, and a way to adapt that to a usable script. Great, but win what? I remembered my travel Settlers game, and discovered that it fits (barely) onto the stage portion of my desk. The final challenge involved shot composition, as there was no good way to have all four characters (even the unspeaking Peter) in all shots and still get the dialog in place. At least, I couldn’t do so without it devolving into just four static identical “wide” shots. So, I ended up with what you see above, after considerable trial and error.

I’m actually rather happy with how it turned out, which is good because I shot almost three times as many pictures as normal for a comic production… and I still couldn’t get the camera to focus on Neil properly when I wanted it to. Sigh.

I’d like to thank Wonderduck for giving me the first grunted syllable in today’s comic, back in the comments for Monday’s comic… *wry grin*

…

You know, if I keep using Bob then I’m going to have to give him a tag and a slot in the cast page, aren’t I?

It’s funny, I always start out with vague notions for what I’ll do with this duck or that set of ducks, but when production time arrives I find myself going in different directions. Bob was going to be a one-time character over those few comics a while back, but when I came up for this DST-zombie joke I realized that I needed him to give Score someone to play off of. It’s not like anybody else around here has the zed-head perspective required, right?

The best laid plans of ducks and men, or some such.

I need to keep my head in the game; I put this comic together Monday night, finished it up… then forgot to upload it to the website until late on Tuesday.

At least I remembered eventually, eh? So far I’ve not missed and update and I’d like to keep it that way!

As you can see, Rusty is capable of enjoying a rich fantasy life. It’s not often, however, that he gets to externalize this for the sake of others’ amusement.

We’ll explore some of Rusty’s “Walter Mitty” tendencies later on, I think. It’s about time that he’s given more to do than providing reaction shots to bad puns.

…

C’mon, now. You don’t really think that Score’s concerned about what Bugs and Daffy think of him, do you?