Russian minister who supports Percy’s quest to become Santa Claus. Fun Fact: Rumor has it that he may have been involved with the activities of a British spy.
The final chapter is starting! This splash page was a lot of fun to do, going back through the archives of the past five years. There is one comic from each story arc in here, as well as a couple bonus things like SR: Scouting. Can you name them all? (I decided not to include reference links on this one a) so that you could try to find them all, and b) ’cause I didn’t want to link to each one.)
This is what I was drawing in reference to last week’s sketchbook. Can you name them all without looking? I think I got all of the protagonists except Megan and Chad, but let me know if I forgot anyone else.
I attempted to translate every page of my scrapbook into Japanese. My results may be questionable. I know on my business cards, it says I teach at Johnson Little Bear School. Oops.
Ref: Percy gets attention | And again
A while ago on Twitter I mentioned that I wish I would have given Percy ear hair. I satisfied this urge with Jorocks’s elf form. I was happy for a change with how the sizing turned out with the elves. Chris’s face is a little off though. In a way, I like it as he kinda looks like his dad this way.
Having a bit of trouble with my mouse. Apparently when I updated to OSX Maverick, the Logitech driver doesn’t play nicely. It makes dragging text boxes a royal pain. If anyone has a fix to cover this until the driver update comes up and can explain it to someone who still isn’t quite familiar with Mac programming yet, I’d love to hear it!
Refs: Gogol | First appearance of Gabriel | Ding-dong? | Left behind
I know, I know, you all wanted to see elf-Jorocks. He’s still getting dressed. But hooray, Percy now owns the North Pole! Yes, there would probably be a huge pile of paperwork involved. No, I’m not going to show it. Paperwork isn’t usually funny.
This wound up being quite text-intensive, which is something I’m working on. However, in this case I felt it was justified, especially as I cut a large amount of material out to make this whole legal matter go faster, and hey, there’s a lot of details that needed to be presented but don’t need to have a whole arc devoted to them. If the comic updated three or five days a week, I would have spread that out more, but once a week calls for a different scripting strategy, especially when I know what needs to happen by certain dates.
Ref: Others taking notice | And again | Percy gets on the news | Thomas Gabriel sees the sleigh | Thomas Gabriel introduces himself | Jorocks’s unplanned appearance | Thomas Gabriel helps | Unscrupulous comrades | John is being watched
I think I just broke my record for most reference links, even if I didn’t include links to this same story arc! This comic pulls together a few old loose ends, some of which I’m betting you didn’t see coming. The big one, of course, being General Anatol’s endorsement of Percy’s plan, allowing him to proceed. Those of you who are James Bond fans will likely recognize him as General Anatol Gogol, who is one of my favorite characters of all time and appears in several Bond movies.
While I have always had the idea of outside forces affecting Percy’s dream, nothing was set in stone until the Tornado arc and the creation of Thomas Gabriel. I really like the name as he was a sort of guardian angel during the events of that arc, and I liked the character I had made, so I expanded his role to maintain that guardian angel character. He then appeared in the airport to ease Percy’s passage and helped explain Jorocks being there (how did he know?), but it was never shown who that was. I have since updated his character tags, so apologies if you’re a new reader and had that spoiler.
Next comic is #200! We finally leave the building!