Conventional Wisdom

Okay, some context: Ret-Con was in a very different direction than the overwhelming majority of the cons I’ve been driving to and from in recent years, yet it still went through the same intersection just outside of town as the sort of “you’re almost home” milestone.  Just, you know, going through on the other road.  But because I was tired and kind of on autopilot, by brain defaulted to a “coming home from the con” routine that had been established on that OTHER route.  Long story short, I instinctively turned left when I should have kept going straight, and wound up bumbling down a busy road with very few chances to get off, and thus the last six or seven minutes of my drive home became the last fifteen or twenty minutes.

Next, some more meta context: This page was originally earmarked as a Patreon comic when I first drew it, part of a MAJOR surge of creativity on Friday and Saturday.  It’d been a while since I’d drawn anywhere NEAR that many pages during the con… and when Sunday rolled around, I got a reminder of why I’ve largely waited until AFTER the con to start drawing.  Just in case that line down in the corner wasn’t enough of a clue, what I thought at the time was a one-off mishap turned out to the start of a running gag, one that definitely deserves to be part of the weekend’s main story.  Alas, that means I’ve been drastically reshuffling all the OTHER material I have to try and construct a new narrative arc that wasn’t intended when I first drew them.  Again, this is a big part of why I’ve been waiting until the con was OVER to start drawing.

But hey, I went into this weekend half-expecting to struggle with too LITTLE material to work with.  This is the best kind of problem to have.