Oooh, I feel an incoming exposition dump. Fun times ahead!

For now, though, we’re stuck with Fris and his seemingly rather strained (but not assillenz-like in any way) relationship with Avie. Luckily, the current insult streak has been halted by Fris’s remembering of… something. Uh, I bet we’ll learn what exactly it is that has him calling out to the divine spirits soon enough, but for now we’re left to speculate. Perhaps he forgot his phone at work? Or maybe he was ticketed for an accidental parking violation? Who knows, but whatever it is, it can’t be all that bad, right?

Right?

Website-Exclusive Author’s Note:

Well, here’s a new thing: A page I don’t completely hate.

This time I chose to follow my own advice and kept redrafting until I found something that worked. Who knew that it was this simple to get to an end result with poses that don’t completely suck. Crazy stuff!

Anyway, in terms of artistic things, this page continues the continual series of continuing iteration of my art style that has continuously taken place since the start of this comic. For example, we now have darker and more vibrant shadows that mix nicely with the warmer reddish color that I first introduced into my line art last page. Together, these two changes make the resulting visuals slightly more interesting while costing me literally zero additional work hours in the creation of any future pages.

Speaking of work hours, this page took around six days of about 2 hours of work a day to create, spread out across almost two weeks ‘cause they don’t call me the “Master Procrastinator” for nothing. Jokes aside, with some optimizations, I could easily churn one of these pages out in around 10 hours in the future. That’ll be my goal for the coming weeks: Workflow optimization and anti-procrastination measures like a return to daily sketching and a documentation of my daily comic progress.

Yes, the Mad Lad is in fact trying it again! With the release of this page, I pledge to release another page by Friday next week. Politician’s promise! I’ll give the one-week release schedule another try, and the next few pages will offer a great starting point for me to get into the flow, especially since they’ll be very dialogue heavy.

Will it work out this time? Will I once again fail miserably, or will this be the dramatic beginning of my redemption arc that will some day make it onto the big screen as a movie called “AP – The rise and fall and rise and fall of some internet idiot”? I have no fucking idea, and as you can probably tell by the inane last few paragraphs, I’m far too tired to even remember how this sentence started.

For that reason, I’ll sign off here for the day. If things work out, you might hear from me again next Friday, otherwise I’ll also have my Twitch Sunday Stream going on, well, Sunday. If you want to watch someone suck at Ace Combat 7, I’m your guy!