Fantasy comedy about a magic knight trying to have a romance in his second language
Sort of a follow-up to Slow News Day: Fertility Clinics.
One of the Kolpovision contestants gets a name! Still not getting his own separate tag, though.
Senna’s at a yard sale. She likes bargains.
Ivy’s second parent also gets a name! (Gentian and Ebony both kept their original surnames when they got married.)
Artsy baby picture of Ivy, long before she started dyeing her hair and wearing color contacts. (And before her magic awakened.) Originally drew this to design Ivy’s other parent — I needed them for the September wallpaper — then turned it into some practice with digitally varying line weights.
Left: Ivy’s nonbinary dad/parent, also Magus Heath Cornouiller’s child. Non-magical transmasc bifauxnen, who finally got a name because it appears in tomorrow’s comic.
Right: Ivy’s gender-nonconforming dad, Ebony. Nature-based magical boy, diplomat to Sønheim for his day job, elaborate femme fashion sense.
Unlike with real-world coronaviruses (where we didn’t put much effort into studying or vaccinating them pre-2020, in spite of the dramatic warning bells that were SARS-1 and MERS), Sønheim and surrounding countries put a heck of a lot of research into brumaviruses.
We had to design a new vaccine from scratch. They just had to swap a few proteins in the template they’d already been finessing for decades.
Trivia: When I first started drawing the quarantine strips, I figured it would just be one big storyline. So I did the first set of 13, then a few strips with the townies, then sketched this strip (and tomorrow’s), all the way back in August.
…at which point I decided the whole thing would work better as a series of mini-arcs. Partly so I could keep using this setting to process real-world developments over months and months. Partly so the long-term plot threads could get more buildup, more suspense, more cliffhangers. Partly because the arc of “where’s our package?” –> “at least we got our package” was such a neat little standalone story unit.
So I wrote more strips about the townies to flesh out Part 2, and drew the intermediary storylines, and got back to writing “there’s a working vaccine, even if our main characters can’t it yet” right around the time the IRL news hit “there are several working vaccines, even if I and the people I know can’t get it yet.”
Storyline warnings (not really spoilery, all things considered): pandemic-inspired content, vampires being vampires, graphic descriptions of murder.
Foreshadowing!
…now I have to come back around to this plot within the same print volume, so it’ll be less than a year before the follow-up, I promise.
Didn’t want Sønheim to get all the flashback action, so here’s what’s going on in Ceannis during the quarantine storylines!
…most of these characters are old enough in the present-day strip that they’re just going from “adult” to “slightly younger adult.” At least they still have plenty of opportunities for ironic foreshadowing.
The employee in the Sønska import grocery is a cameo from Clara Danao, another backer of the Volume 3 Kickstarter. Her present-day self was seen during “Something’s Cooking” as a store employee, as a cameo for backing a previous Kickstarter.
Continue reading Slow News Day (Flashback Edition): Novel Brumavirus
Reward chibi for a Patreon supporter. Archie and Rowan finally meet in person, and get to watch their shows while cuddling together.
New backer-exclusive wallpaper on Patreon: a snowy kiss at midnight.
