the missing Girly commentary

Well, here we go.

Here we go!

The process of going shall commence and it will take place here and involve us.

There was only one way Collette was going to get involved in this whole fight and here it is.

I will not list every videogame reference that occurs from this point on, but I will mention that one of the arrows is pointing to an NES Max controller, my controller of choice in the 80s. It was a controller that offered 360° controls for your NES games! Even though that’s really not possible at all. But it was still a good controller, although I did destroy quite a few of them.

The Gamer Girl sidekick is an amalgamation of Lucas from The Wizard and and champion gamer Billy Mitchell, two of the more well-known antagonists in competitive gaming. I’d recommend everyone watch the King of Kong if they haven’t already. The Wizard as well, if only so you can understand the other two references Girly made to it in past strips (of course, one of them was another Power Glove reference).

When doing huge crowd scenes like this, all I can say is… Thank god for cheats!

I admit I could have composed the top panel a little better. The team is hiding behind a fountain, which is supposed to be a parody of the Litttlefield Fountain, with the horses replaced with ferrets.

Apparently Cutetown U is more or less like the U of Texas, except with its parts all jumbled around. The UT clock tower is actually located directly behind the fountain… and I guess it doesn’t really have a sidekick factory either. Looking at it now, I wish I’d based the factory off of one of UT’s buildings rather than making it up from scratch. I actually visited the campus and took a few pictures to help with backgrounds for this chapter, but it turned out I’m kind of a bad photographer and very few of them proved useful. Ah well. Nowadays I tend to call upon Google Street View for things like this.

For the last panel, I made sure to leave out all the motion lines and speed lines you’d usually see in an action shot like this. It really enhances how spontaneous and absurd Winter’s attack is. Also, in one of this chapter’s many callbacks, Winter’s quoting her parents here, one of those things put in especially for the really attentive readers!

This was a rather fun scene to draw, and I liked how the dialogue turned out. Typically when a soldier or something says “permission to speak frankly” they are granted that permission, but that was not the case here.

Still, I feel a bit saddened looking back on this, knowing that it was pretty much the only comic in the chapter where Evil Otra had a significant appearance. All Evil Otra really did was stand in a tower waiting for Winter to arrive. There had to be more I could do with her… right?

I honestly don’t know. Even though it’s been about three years since I drew this, I’m not sure what I could have done differently. But things really do seem a bit off.

Chapter 15-8 was just too long!

As flawed as 15-8 is, this particular comic of the bunch is one of my favorites. Particularly, the Collette going “aaaaaa” panel is a scene I am rather fond of. Throughout Girly, the saga of Winter and her estranged sister reconciling was fun to do, and it felt good to cap it off in this subchapter.

Allright, time for a completely interesting factoid! When I first thought up Collette, she was going to be a little more insane than she turned out to be. Which is to say, she was going to be a flat-out villain whose goal was to tear Winter n’ Otra’s relationship apart. Basically, her being half cut-n-paste made her life so miserable that she wanted revenge or something.

I’m pretty glad I decided against that. For one thing, the whole “cut-n-paste” deal with Collette turned out to be the most arcane and confusing thing in the comic. By far the most asked question about Girly was what in god’s name “cutpaste” means. Making it a central plot point (and I came close to doing this in the bodyswap chapter) would have been a pretty big disaster. Plus Coll wouldn’t have worked at all as a cartoonish villain. Having her problems with Winter more grounded and relatable led to her being a very fun character to write.

Anyway, this really is the best comic in 15-8, it’s all downhill from here.

15-8 ended up too long because it was the part of the story where pretty much everything gets tied up and explained. And that’s usually when the author finds himself having to do a little more explaining than he expected. The story ended up becoming devoted to a lot of explaining and quite a bit of badass fighting, which didn’t leave a lot of room for good character moments which I feel put the comic at its best in the previous two chapters. And it was too long. and Otra isn’t in it.

There are quite a few flashbacks in this subchapter, and while it did seem to confuse some readers a little at the time, it’s a pretty simple story when you take it all in at once. Essentially, Collette’s Dad — Winter’s stepdad — was so bitter about their mom marrying someone else that he became cartoonishly evil and basically caused everything in the chapter to happen. It’s not exactly the kind of twist I expect people to fall out of their seats over, but for myself, there was something psychologically satisfying about having the lamest character in Cutewendy turn out to be the Big Bad here.

At least, until he realized the error of his ways and dealt with it by being a runaway dad. He finally had the decency to call his daughter and confess to everything and that brings us to here. At first, Collette’s story corroborates with what Winter heard so much that she falls a little bit more into that well of despair… and then, THERE’S A DIFFERENCE.

Yes, the plan of the Sidekicks was not at all flawless. They couldn’t get Otra to bump off Winter completely… and they probably weren’t even aware that Collette existed. More than anything, they underestimated Winter and I tried to make it clear in a not-at-all-subtle way.

A ton of stuff happens in 15-8… but it still went on a bit too long.

It opens on a somewhat positive note that Yumi was, in fact, okay. Winter’s parents rescued her! Which, I freely admit, was the best I could do at some kind of explanation as to why they couldn’t help Winter right away. Basically, they lose track of Winter when they scramble to help the poor injured girl, and by the time they find her, she has it together again. I don’t know if it entirely works, but once again, nobody brought it up in the comment box, so perhaps I did get away with it.

But enough pointing out flaws that didn’t receive any actual complaints… here’s some interesting tidbits about Yumi’s French!

Yumi had quite a bunch of key information that would have essentially spoiled the rest of the story, so of course I could not have her able to just tell it all to Lucy right away. I pondered either having the blow to her head render her mute or with a mild case of amnesia (both temporary, of course), but once I remembered that her earlier backstory mentioned she was from Quebec, I knew the correct thing to do.

As it says in the credits, Dave Lumsdon and Gisele Lagace were called upon to help with the French. I sent them a pencil layout of the comic with English text pasted in for Yumi, like so:

And in the next panel Yumi just says “Ohh, What am I going to do? I have to tell Winter something REALLY important. But she won’t be able to understand me!”

The funny thing was, that was it. At the time, I didn’t request to have French-Canadian swear words added to the dialogue, and I didn’t even know they were there until some readers in the comments translated it! I never did find out what made Dave & Giz decide to take that bit of creative license, but I was so pleased with it that I told them to do more of it when Yumi’s French comes up again toward the end of the chapter.

KNOW YOUR FRENCH-CANADIAN SWEARS:

“Tabarnak” doesn’t directly translate to anything, but for all intents and purposes, it means “fuck”.

“Sti” is short for “Ostie” and like many English swears it’s taken from something originally meant to be religious. Its swear-word-impact is about the same as “SHIT”.

You are now ready to visit Quebec and stub your toe somewhere.

Oh hey, in the last post I forgot to mention that Mickey’s shirt has the words “Ganja Manga” on it with a picture of an anime-style Hannah from Octopus Pie in the middle. It’s pretty much lost in the pixels of the online version, but it shows up okay in the print version. I’m kinda lookin’ forward to the day when all monitors will be retina and we’ll be able to create tiny details and jokes like that more easily. As for what the shirt means… well, it’s kind of an in-joke. If you get it, congrats.

15-7 was another situation where I knew I was using rather lame tropes, so I played around with them in my usual way to make ‘em work. The rampant returning characters spark a bit of self-awareness on Jen’s part. Then when everyone gets to talking about how great the two main characters are, it kinda degenerates into irreverence and Captain Fist lets us know he still has no idea the two were responsible for nearly all the “heroic” acts he did for the city.

Does doing a lame thing, then turning around and making jokes about how lame it is, make the lame thing okay? This is debatable. But I do feel 15-7 was pretty necessary, and I do not regret adding it in.

Yes, I think I can say I have no regrets about Girly whatsoever.

UP NEXT: 15-8, a subchapter that fills me with deep regret

P.S. Those who own the print collection (and the one person who owns the digital edition of the print collection) know that - simple though it was - I actually had quite a bit of trouble ending this subchapter. If you want details on that BUY THE BOOKS

And now a return to the commentaries about the subchapter where a lot of characters return.

Kind of like the subchapter about the kittens, there isn’t a heck of a lot to say about this one, really, so I’ll do one more after this and then skip right along to the ridiculously long and somewhat problematic Chapter 15-8, of which there’s approximately 5 million things to talk about.

Many of the characters that appeared in 15-7 had a look that evolved gradually over time, but Clampjaw hasn’t appeared in several years. I sorta had to learn how to draw him all over again. It was fun!

Also fun was drawing Mickey with a completely new look for the fourth or fifth time. Apparently I forgot that I did this already at the start of the chapter. But it’s all right… At this point, I considered the style-changing thing to be part of her personality, as was the deal with Collette. Nevertheless, I did end up liking the earlier hairstyle in the chapter a bit better, so I gave it back to her when I transferred her over to Doctor V… then after somewhat of a timeskip in that series, I gave her a nice ragdoll look… which is what she has in You Suck right now! Will she change again? Probably not, actually.

On another note, I’m not entirely sure if Babs will appear in You Suck, which is actually a bit odd as I always considered those two attached at the hip. But You Suck is a comic that has surprised me in various ways.