Before BOHICA: Early Proto-Dynastic Era (Patreon)

As mentioned with the earlier post about developing a story, I was unable to keep myself from making things progress. I'm compelled to expound on characters and show things growing and changing, and I have a hard time avoiding the development of relationships between characters. In this case, I felt it necessary to have a romantic relationship between early Joe Rock and Sharilee, even though originally the characters had nothing to do with each other and were intended to be stand-alone gag-a-day stories. 

People who have been reading along the "Empires" comics have seen the same thing develop in a much more structured format; and of course all kinds of relationships flourish in that story --relationships between friends and comrades as well as adversaries, not just romantic relationships. I feel much more comfortable working on a larger "canvas" with multi-page chapters unfolding. 

This isn't to say that I don't enjoy or like gag-a-day or stand-alone comics. I generally enjoy them a lot, it's just that I can't keep my own works from expanding and building on each other. I feel like there is always more to say, somehow.

This was just a basic comic about how half the chow halls on Ft. Carson were always closed, and we had to go stand in obnoxiously long lines with limited time to get what we saw as mediocre food. The flipside, of course, paying out of our own pocket and wasting time going to an off-post restaurant that was probably just as crowded and offered only slightly better food. 

This is where my constant drive to create steady, regular characters with relationships would prove to be a weakness, in my opinion. Before I really knew how to pace myself, I would start to develop a relationship between two characters, and soon those two characters were the only things doing anything together-- all other characters faded into the background and were eventually forgotten. There was no need to have Sharilee in the comic, it could have been any character, but I had fixed the idea in my mind that these two were the "stars". 

I like to think I've learned a lot since then and I am now much better at expanding interpersonal; developments between a wide assortment of characters... especially since I like "ensemble casts" of lots of different characters.

One of our running jokes during the REFORGER exercise in Germany was how often our TOCs (Tactical Operation Centers, or "field headquarters") were always located next to a pig farm. Or it could just be that it was hard to find *any* place in the German countryside that wasn't somehow adjacent to a pig farm... Obviously I took suggestions from other soldiers in the unit and would give them a shout-out as well.

Good times! Until the next one!