#238: Aftermath II

I know, I know, since anthros are freaks of nature, they don't actually have any evolutionary rungs to be pushed down to. Like I've said before, it's a comic strip, so don't take it seriously.

Now for a really long-winded talk about this storyarc: I came up with the idea for it shortly after I discovered a sci-fi Internet radio station and was on an intense X Minus One binge. It's a lot different than the previous "Roger and Xandra get into a scrape and have to find their way out" storyarcs. It has a lot of drama, suspense, heavy foreshadowing and cliffhangers (though I made sure it had plenty of well-placed gags as well. It wouldn't be SQ without them). I've also broken a couple of my unwritten rules – the one that says that Xandra and Roger must both appear in an individual strip at least once, and the one that says that the strips must be less than 2000 pixels high.

I thought that it had been a while since Roger saved the universe from an impending threat, and in this arc, he does (quite inadvertently, however). The story also tends to revolve around him alone instead of him and Xandra (who starts to teeter over into the "Mary Sue Zone" towards the end, but I tried to tone her down by having her suggestion be an addition to the science officer's theory instead of one pulled out of nowhere).

In the Sierra Reunion audio file, Mark Crowe asks, "What could Roger do that he hasn't already done?", and when no one is able to come up with any answers to this besides "get a personality", Scott Murphy remarks, "Perhaps this is why there's not a SQ7". I saw that question as a challenge, and my various responses to it have been made into these strips, and this one chronicles yet another bizarre accident that Roger hasn't officially endured.

The "people landing on an alien planet and gradually becoming alien themselves" theme is a little clichéd, but I tried to pump some new life into it by putting a spin that I'd never seen done before on it. Having a corny term to describe this variation helps as well. ;)

And finally, "Snikwad" is "Dawkins" – as in Richard Dawkins, adamant, outspoken evolutionary biologist, a. k. a., "Darwin's rottweiler", former mutual friend of Douglas Adams – spelled backwards. Get it? Evolution – backwards? Congratulations to RW+X_in_SQ7 for correctly guessing the joke (the only one to even guess, as a matter of fact).

Kudos to Quill/Aelin for giving me a few suggestions on the story's ending – at first, the DNA graft was going to be the ultimate solution, but it didn't seem adequate for me. Aelin's simple "animal intervention" suggestion of was enough to inspire me to create the current resolution.

I'm going on a brief hiatus now that this arc is finally completed. I've been working overtime to keep the strips coming out on a weekly basis for a long time now, and I could really use a break.

EDIT: I can't believe I forgot this! Here is a page full of concept sketches for this storyarc that I thought I'd throw in. There are also some notes I made on the "Over My Head" video, some notes taken while I was playing Shivers, a random doodle or two, and some irritated scribblings regarding my computer's health (which has improved remarkably with the arrival of my new all-in-one scanner/printer).