A Room with a View

A Room with a View

by John Wigger on June 29, 2011

Okay, now you can talk about how you all knew from the beginning that John was being possessed by Drew to have relations with Buffy.

Buffy has only been in plot based comics once before as seen here.

She’s the blonde seen in the “A Zombie’s Survival Guide: Liquid Diet”.

Drew left the guys’ apartment when he decided to go haunt here in A ghost of a chance.

Apparently things worked out between the two of them and they’ve had a “physical” relationship for a while… up until recently with the aide of Whoopi Goldberg.

I wanted to get to this point in their story before I brought Buffy back into the comic’s cast more permanently and explained her and Drew’s situation further.

Holy crap on a stick, you guys have no idea how many comments I’ve had to censor or remove to try and keep “some” mystery alive for this reveal. I know it’s not ‘who stole the Lindbergh baby?’, but come on… people just wanted to post that they figured it out or something.

I’ve got more stuff to come, but yeah, that’s what Drew was doing. You’re all so smart.

I came up with what I thought to be a pretty nifty panel border treatment for today’s comic. I know it’s not 100% original, but I can’t place where I have seen it in the past off of the top of my head. If you can think of something similar, lemme know in the comments or via email or something…. I’m easy to get a hold of.

I’m not saying I’m brilliant for doing something groundbreaking, but I thought it was kinda cool. I wanted to not have to censor the ‘action’ going on inside the room, as I’m not going to show full on nudity in the comic… and I felt the funny part of the gag would be with George outside the window… This border as the window has the viewer inside the room and George hanging out, literally, outside.

p.s.: The story arc still has more to get to. Even if you guessed this weeks ago, I hope to still be able to sneak stuff past you before it’s over.

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Special Editions

by John Wigger on May 11, 2012

I’ve been working on a project for a little while… I have been quietly editing the earliest strips in the archive to get the fonts/word balloons up to a look closer to the current quality/standard. Each update day for the last week I’ve not only been putting out a new comic… I’ve also put up an edited version of one of the earliest strips in the Zombie Roomie archive.

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.