Edie, Part Four
Commentary: On
January 30, 2011 ~ 10 Comments
Look, I’ve fixed it in the archives!
Anyway… Steve Yoh, or the unfortunate copy thereof, is very influenced by Rimmer on “Red Dwarf,” a show that apparently made a deep impression on me. If I’d ever drawn more Edie strips, I wanted to have a storyline where the original Steve visits the satellite for some reason and it’s just incredibly awkward for everyone involved. I’m still kind of sorry I never got the chance to do that.
As some people guessed in the last installment, I chose Argo as a nod to the old, much-embellished-upon filk song “Banned from Argo.” 512 was named after Andrew’s birthday.
For the Edie strips, I experimented with typed fonts. They look really awkward, and I still letter by hand to this day.
You mean 512 wasn’t named for the all-important ninth power of two?
I’m not sure what sort of beep is represented by that font, but I presume it’s somewhere between a classy gameshow buzzer and the blank tone used to censor TV dialogue.
Aside from abstruse comments on minidresses and go-go boots, I have this to say: Edie reeeeeeeaaaaaaaallllllllly needs to be the Next Big Thing after Skin Horse is complete.
Pretty please?
I like the mad-eye in the next-to-last frame
Steve should consider this a promotion to Department Head.
The main problem with the typed lettering is just that you selected inappropriate fonts. Steve’s font is okay, but Edie is using Comic Sans, and you should never, ever use Comic Sans unless you’re making a greeting card for your grandmother or something.
I’ve pretty much always used font lettering simply because my penmanship is horrible and my hand cramps up if I try to draw such fiddly things as letterforms too much, and also I like how digital typography makes it easy to edit the text and rearrange the words for better flow and so on. Blambot is indispensible.
Also, this strip makes me realize just how much of Unity was inspired by this, too.
So It Begins: “Edie reeeeeeeaaaaaaaallllllllly needs to be the Next Big Thing after Skin Horse is complete.”
YES!!! THIS!!! *SO* THIS!!!
There is never any excuse for using Comic Sans.
Ed: Can we go one day, ONE DAY, without resorting to puns?
. . . and yes, that was retorical.
Agreed about the Comic Sans, but the typed fonts kind of work for Steve, as they would for most robotic or computerized characters most of the time (well, maybe not the Madblood Androids…). The problem is that a strip where some text is typed and other text is hand-lettered almost always looks … well, awkward at best. Maybe it’s just a matter of finding fonts that work for the other characters, too, and that aren’t Comic Sans.
Also, I TOTALLY second (or third, or whatever ordinal number we’re up to) the motion to produce more Edie strips. I almost said, “the motion to revive Edie,” but in the Shaenonverse that could imply all sorts of other processes that weren’t really what I had in mind.