0052 - Doreen

(Shame on me - the first appearance of a new character, and I don't even mention her in the comments! Fixed it now, though... Mark, Sep 2010.)

Introducing Doreen, yet another person dragged from real life into the comic (certainly makes it easier than having to come up with all the characters myself!). I first met her when I was working in the Pricing department at Target, and we'd have occasional little conversations. She no longer stops by Target in the course of work (as of 2010, when I'm writing this paragraph), but she still shops there, so those occasional little conversations still come up, I'm happy to report. She's such a sweetheart.

This strip was another one of those situations where I wasn't certain if my intended script for a strip would be approved by the real-life person involved, but thankfully, Doreen seems to have a reasonably robust sense of humour, and she had no problem with it at all. Phew!

This is also the first strip where I came to my senses, and started splitting up the pictures into more manageable chunks... ComicGenesis allows the option of having several files representing the day's strip, consisting of the date followed by a letter, rather than just the date. I was aware of this practically from the start, but it didn't really "click" inside my head (sometimes, my brain is more like a coffee percolator), and so I continued to put all the panels into a single picture. This was causing a lot of trouble with the graphics-editing program I was using, but then the penny finally dropped, and I went to splitting things up (although this one uses two pictures, instead of the later change to one picture per panel by strip #66).

There'll be an extra strip this coming Sunday, in honor of Father's Day... so don't forget to stop by...