Wednesday, April 1st 2009 - [1452]Minervacon (17 of 49)

Recommended Reading: "Namir Deiter")

Original Commentary
For commentary on the swapped version, please see the bottom of this page. Also, as of the 04/02, the order these comics will appear in will be swapped.

The April First NDU 2009 Swap I came out with the ideal to swap the main page's designs for April Fools around midnight on the 31th. Instantly the visual of Joan and Gabby in bed popped into my head. I had to do it, especially considering these "disorienting, but won't piss you off too much" style pranks usually come to me around April 5th . Terrence, the wonderful coder on demand he is, got a code set up on the sites to swap them at midnight April 1st [edit- and it turned out to be broken because he only double checked YSIF, which made a once fun project turn maddening], so that was the easier part (at least for me- he still had to code the thing XD). Then came my part, who to put in who's shoes. You Say it First was pretty easy. Joan and Gabby make pretty good stand-ins for Kimberly and Brisbane, although I did have brief second thoughts, as Charles and Tipper would play the parts more accurately. But the idea was out-awsomed. Namir Deiter took a little more thinking, but not too much- there are only so many females that I could chose from, and really only one per character who could pull it off. Jane looks like a smaller nosed, heavy set version of Gabby as it is, and Tipper and Kimberly both have that long hair- and Sofia and Joan are both red-heads (and possibly crazy- which has nothing to do with their hair color). The awkwardness of the YSIF characters makes it just a little funnier- Gabby and Joan look almost too comfortable in bed together. Ok, now that we have our mis-mashed cast....

The process: There were a few ways to have done this. I could either draw one comic and photoshop the different heads onto them. This would have made Gabby/Jane/Brisbane a little difficult, but it could have happened. I could have drawn both versions free hand, but that would have taken a lot more time and the comics would not have looked as similar as they did, two strikes against it. So in the end, I went with a way that was a little bit of both versions.

Step one was draw and ink the alternate character versions of the comics. I picked them first because, even though I had started them very early in the day, if by off chance I didn't get the real versions done tonight, I wanted something up at midnight exactly and of the two it was more important. Although I think it would have been less difficult turning Tipper into Kimberly, but oh well. I did not ink the outsides with the larger pen to make the tracing easier.

From there, the original and a blank were taped onto a light box where I sketched and inked the new heads, and inked everything else that just needed to be traced. I had to make several small changes (Gabby is thinner than Jane and Brisbane's chest is no where as large as Gabby's, much to Gabby's happiness) but for the most part I kept them as exact as I could. Here are some photos I took mid-way and at the end of the process, the traced ones look so clean compared to the originals (in the YSIF comic, you can see a bit of a camera angle I had tried but gave up on).

PS- The first hour things were broken. Fortunately, I was able to get them more-or-less fixed.

Modern Commentary
The Namir Deiter counterpart is available here - Terrence