Hello and welcome back to the new and (hopefully) improved Back Office 😀
Yepp, I’ve flipped everything around, and Back Office now uses the same layout as Bata Neart. This was down to a few reasons, but the main reason was that the comic-strip format of what I will now call ‘Classic Back Office’, made it regularly difficult to layout and plan pages. Also, originally Back Office was planned as a gag-a-day strip comic, however since then this comic has become a long-form adventure series that just doesn’t work too well in a letter-box.
In addition, I can now start posting Back Office up onto the likes of Taptastic, which wasn’t really ideal in the Classic format. So I’m going to try that out and see how it goes.
FYI, just like Bata Neart, all Back Office stories will conform to a 20 page limit with updates in 5 week blocks. Here is a break-down of how it works:
With 20 being the target number, the updates are broken into 5-page blocks, separated by 1-week update breaks. This means that you will get 5 weeks of updates, followed by no update for one week, and then another 5 weeks with updates. It’ll look like this for a standard chapter.
X = Update, O = No update
X-X-X-X-X – O – X-X-X-X-X – O – X-X-X-X-X – O – X-X-X-X-X
The breaks are kind of needed by me. They allow for weeks when I can’t update, and at times when all is well, they will help prop up the Update Buffer.
In conclusion, welcome back, thank you for your endless patience with me, and I hope you enjoy this brand new chapter.
Welcome back. I can’t wait to see what happens. Now what are Ashling and Aoife doing here? 😛
But I am curious as to who that mysterious woman in the old 1930’s American-style football helmet is.
@Farren: I’m thinking the helmet is likely a Tron reference, like in the Q-Matic arc.
@Farren: Ashling and Aoife?! Dang…I still need to work on diversifying my designs.
@Kessy: You are very much on the right track, as you’ll find out soon 😀
Oh no. Does that mean we’re going up against Clu and Rinzler/Tron or Master Control (MCP)/Edward Dillinger? So who gets to play the roll of Kevin Flynn or Sam Flynn?
On an unrelated note, the CAPTCHA for this comment was “FU82” which I find more amusing than I should.
I recognize Mike and Karen, but I’m pretty embarrassed to admit that I can’t place the lady on the left. The figure in the back does look more like a game avatar, so I don’t feel bad about that. 🙂
Welcome back. ^^
@Farren: Ahh that cheeky CAPTCHA of mine 😀 I can’t claim credit for that alas, the CAPTCHA supplier controls all of that.
@Delta: Don’t be too embarrassed Delta, she’s gotten a bit of a redesign. If you have read through the whole comic, she *is* a character you have seen before, but she was never named. The clue is in the pattern on her ‘Tron’ hat ;D
(Legal Disclaimer: Back Office characters and stories have no relation what so ever to the Disney produced film series ‘Tron’. It’s merely due to many dozens of coincidences that the Q-Matic world and characters therein look exactly the same. For all you know I’ve never seen Tron [Looks around nervously, then dashes out door] )
I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but I have heard that Disney can be really uptight about that sort of thing. I don’t know a lot about copyright laws and fair use, but you might want to put up a real legal disclaimer.
@Kessy: Thank you for concern, and I think I will probably update the existing disclaimer to beef it up with coverage for this. I think i’m well covered under Fair-use Parody.
Also ‘Tron’ wasn’t the only series to use the ‘sucked into computer world’ plot device. I use a similar device and add a call-center angle…added to me using my own cast of original characters. The nearest I get to a pure Tron character is probably Q-Matic…which you could compare to the MCP. However I believe that Q-Matic is a different enough character with a different agenda, motivation and method of operating. Also, South Park simply copied the MCP design and made him ‘Moses’, and they got away with that 😀
Another example I could use is Space Balls (since we we’re talking about it last summer). It’s pretty much Star Wars with a load of Mel Brooks injected into it. Also Dark Helmet is Darth Vader if you ignore the height (if possible). They got away with it under Fair Use 🙂
They “got away with it” in Spaceballs because Mel Brooks asked George Lucas for permission personally.
@Roger: Ooo, I never knew that. I wonder if he would have gotten away with it anyway, but asking Lucas himself surly helped a lot 😀