Vacation Sketches 4

Mandy\'s avatar

 Figuring out character ideas for my friends Fitz n Floyd. You’ve seen them, and Jenna, occasionally in background or non-speaking roles, but surprisingly, never as the punchline! I’ve known these guys for more than a decade, it’s hard to derive good comic material from laughs that are peppered with inside jokes.

That said – on Fitz’s side, the joke about him threatening to tell Mom, is because people assumed we were siblings in undergrad – we’re both redheaded. First he used it to embarrass me, then we just started going along with it, and nowadays even my parents treat him like part of the family.

32 comments on “Vacation Sketches 4

  1. Great t-shirt logo. Reminds me of the anime convention comic shirt that said, “Ironic shirt.” Thanks for continuing the sketch comics. It feels like a special occasion when these come out.

    1. What you need is a shirt with just a picture of an iron. People will ask about it, and you just respond dryly “it’s ironic”.

  2. I hope you’re enjoying your vacation. I do understand the necessity of it, even if I don’t get as many as I would like to have. If I was you, I wouldn’t do ANYTHING that I didn’t want to do while taking your much deserved time off. Take care of yourself and I look forward to when you feel up to returning.

  3. Ah, the beauty of inside jokes. (And as long as MTG continues to mean Magic: The Gathering I will cower before my friend and his $1000 decks with my meager cardstock pile.) Loving the sketch interlude, hope you’re loving the vacation!

  4. Hi Mandy! I really like these sketches; they make great filler for when you need a break from the comic. Thank you for showing them to us!

  5. An other good webcomic that I can comment?! HOURRAY! \o/
    Also, cats and dogs roleplaying are funny.

  6. What’s with the blacked out corner? Also, love this comic. ^^

    1. I asked that too.
      Apparently that’s just the back of the scanner. She just didn’t white it out.

    2. Yeah, I just scanned 3 pages and vaguely arranged them, it’s nothing intentionally blacked out – but I can see how it’s confusing!

    3. Awww… here we were all hoping it was something scandalous that you decided we shouldn’t see..

  7. I still play MTG….if by play you mean obsessively hoard cards with no one nearby to play with… >m>

    I never get to show off my amazing artifact deck, besides that one three-headed dragon duel I got to do a few years back. That was fun….eheheh…

  8. You know, considering that you have an inside joke about Fitz and you being related, I’m suprised you didn’t make him close to the same species.

    1. I did find it amusing that Floyd looks more like my kin than Fitz does, in these!

      As usual, the decision was made in my usual manner of just asking them “so what critter would you like to be?” In this case it became a brainstorm session with Jenna (Fitz’s fiance), and all of us really liked her ideas in the end.

  9. Ask friend what he wants to be in the comic, make him something else, anyway. Seems to go well with the “I’m telling mom!” bit. 😀

  10. I played MtG… until the RP club stopped me using my Painbow Deck (It’s a rainbow deck which caused so much pain and misery in the club’s MtG group by destroying single, dual and tri-colour decks with great abandon.)

    1. Love the pun on “painbow.” 😀 I was always afraid of decks over 2 colors, I hated getting mana screwed!

      I quit playing much when the group at my college got REALLY SUPER competitive about it.

      Fitz is really into it. He’s one of those guys with encyclopedic knowledge of the cards, loves building decks and loves figuring out vicious strategies. He’s probably good enough for tournament play – just not competitive enough for it. Possibly the defining moment of my MTG experience was playing against him once in college. He played:

      Beacon of Immortality (double life total for target player) and he targeted me.
      then, False Cure (for every life point gained this turn, that player instead loses two life points)
      Two-card insta-kill.

      Impressive, and he didn’t break any rules (that we knew of at the time, don’t know or care if that’s changed), but I was playing a deck HE built for me. He knew full well it didn’t have any counters for player-targeting spells, it was a simple creature deck because I was just learning the game.

      …so he laughed, and said he knew it was really unfair but he just wanted to play that card combo once because he was so excited when he came up with it.
      Then he took the cards out of the game, untapped mana, and we just played on as though it didn’t happen. He still won, just in a more fair game.

      That became my standard for “will I play a game with you?” Are you more concerned with winning, or are you playing to have fun?

    2. …oh, and my specific standard for playing MTG is “is it cool that I run Unhinged cards?”

      If they say no, I don’t wanna play with them.

  11. At least they had some say in it.
    This whole comic started because she just started drawing me after my namesake.

    1. “What kind of fox would you be?”
      “…uh…a–the usual kind?”

      The ones I keep startling at 3am when I’m out enjoying the night at the same time they are.

  12. Fitz is TOTALLY singing “I”M SO EXCITED~!” in picture three. That or “SHE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE!”

    1. Probably “She Blinded Me With Science”, because of the blacked out corner.

  13. It kind of amazes me how someone posts a weekly comic for a few years without a long break. Hope you enjoy this one.
    (I also really hope that your conversations with Fitz and Floyd aren’t just inside jokes so we can see more of them.)

  14. I run esper as my primary strategy, and I have a nasty little dragon headed into that one soon. I’m going to be putting together a gruel werewolves soon, I just popped an Arlinn Kord/Arlinn, Embraced by The Moon, so I need to get some good wolves together.

      1. Also, Pokémon GO field test is cool, but buggy as all getout.

  15. I still play. Mostly Modern, where I run Bogles.

    Yay hexproof everything! And with Leyline of Sanctity, includes myself!

  16. I still play MTG… And with the new set they released awhile back my wolf and werewolf deck is complete… Flying and land destroying cards are my greatest weakness though… It really, really sucks

Comments are closed.