jephjacques

A Marked Improvement In Relations

Iris is such a sweetie pie :)

Reading Rainbow

Nobel Prize in boners

Sounds Like Nonsense To Me

She's just prejudiced against serifs

Teed Up

Okay!!! Finally home and unpacked and de-jetlagged. Hopefully there will be no more shenanigans wrt the comic or the website now.

His Home Is The Sea

when in doubt, jump into ocean

They Answer To The King

Or queen, whichever is around

Welcome Back Everyone

Some time has passed!

Directember: Mr. Face

This strip ended up being one of the key moments in the Hannelore and Sven dynamic (as well as the Faye and Sven dynamic...) in that Hanners is apparently immune to Sven's charms. It's funny that the random comic button served me up this particular strip, since a big chunk of the Dora/Tai wedding arc was about how Hanners and Sven are actually pretty good for each other as friends!

If I'm doing my math right, this concludes DIRECTEMBER. Thank you so much for your support while I took th...

Directember: Bedtime

If I'm doing the (admittedly very basic) math right, this is the second to last Directember update? I think??? It's Sunday night, which means the comic for Monday goes live on the site, which means the comic for Patreon is Tuesday? And if regular comics resume on January 2nd, Patreon gets it 24 hours early, which means January 1st, but since I post before bed, that really means it's the post I make on the night of the 31st. Yes, I really have posted 5400+ comics every night, by hand, without ...

Directember: A Night At The Improv

Finally, another truly ancient comic! Back when Faye didn't use contractions in her speech because I thought it sounded cute (ugh) and I was painstakingly drawing in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet (uuuuggghhhh). I actually don't hate the art in this one, it's kind of charming in a "drawn with a felt tip marker" kind of way. I also hadn't figured out how to draw speaking mouths with visible lips yet. It's wild the stuff you'd think you'd instinctively just Know How To Draw and then it turns ou...

Directember: She's Totally Playing Into It

The whole "it sounds like they were having Sexual Times but actually they were not" gag is as old as time, but I like the little spin I put on it in this strip. Also man, I used to draw Hanners looking a lot more unhinged than she does these days. Combination of her being in a better place now and also my art looking less weird and askew, lol. I do like how shaggy Marigold's hair looks in this strip though. She's more floofy these days but I think the hikkikomori hair was a cute part of her ...

Directember: The Good Old Days

Lol at 2009 Jeph looking back at earlier comics with a sense of nostalgia

he had no idea

Directember: Octo-Camo

I have started drawing comics again! It feels good to be back on the horse. However I also came down with a head cold, so it's a very snotty horse at the moment.

As I said in yesterday's post, writing trash fires like Liz is super fun! Years ago I was doing an interview with someone and I said sometimes characters "just wander in from the cold" to describe how they show up, basically out of nowhere, and instantly establish themselves as a key character in whatever I'm doing with the str...

Directember: Practical Advice

I think out of all the characters in my comic, Willow is the one I most wish I had more time and opportunity to focus on. Her personality, attitude, and character design are all just so fun! But as it stands she's kind of peripheral to the periphery of the main cast, if that makes any sense. I expect that to change, or at least I hope it does. As fun as it is writing awful gremlins (Liz, Marigold) and dumpster fires (May, Ayo, Anh...), there's something even more fulfilling about writing a c...

Directember Scheduling Goofs

Hey y'all, I accidentally posted tonight's Directember entry...yesterday? Two days ago? What even is time when you're traveling. ANYWAY just writing this to say that the next regular post will be TOMORROW night.

I have begun writing comics again. They are very silly so far. :)

Directember: Olfactory Reset

Making Roko not be a cop anymore is definitely one of the better choices I've made. It opened up a lot more possibilities for her as a character, and also meant I didn't have to do comics about how Some Cops Are Good Actually (even "good cops" are part of a system of oppression that harms all of us, but disadvantaged people and minorities most of all, etc). She's become one of my real favorites! I don't have hard boundaries between "goofy" characters and "straight men," but she definitely fal...

Directember: I-Ikari-san?!

I think this might have been the first instance of Dale doing the Gendo Ikari pose from Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you had told me in 2010 that people would still be playing WoW in 2024 I'd probably be like "...huh. Yeah, seems plausible." And remember those thicc-ass old-style computer displays? Man. It's like seeing a CRT monitor. Ancient tech. If QC is still going in 10 years I'll be like "man, remember when computers were separate devices that didn't live on a chip in our brainstem? Also...

Directember: Baking Lessons

Aww, Clinton and Elliot being cute and bi at each other! And also Cosmo is there! That bear looks like more of a woodchuck or perhaps some kind of terrier though. Clinton and Elliot are a cute couple, it was a lot of fun writing them slowly spiraling into the makeout zone. It has, shockingly, been quite some time since we've seen THEM either! Cubetown and then The Stuff That Happened After Cubetown really monopolized my entire brain for a couple years. AND IT MAY CONTINUE TO DO SO! Or not. I ...

Directember: Pass The Salt

Wow it really is Characters We Haven't Seen In Forever Week huh? I had really high hopes for Brun after how bonkers her introduction storyline with Clinton was, but then the ideas sort of dried up. Sometimes a character just doesn't have the juice, so to speak. I could see coming back to her someday maybe, but to be honest it's probably better for the comic as a whole if I focus on the characters who DO have the metaphorical juice, rather than trying to squeeze metaphorical juice from a metap...

Directember: They See Him Rollin'

I wonder what that roomba is up to these days. Raising its offspring in Cubetown, perhaps? Sorry for not much commentary on this one, I was just on planes and trains for 14 hours and my brain is fried.

Sucker Punch-Drunk

Wil and Penelope! Been a long time since we've seen Wil. Sometimes a character will just sort of fall by the wayside and I don't pick them up for a while, and my focus shifts elsewhere and suddenly it's been 5 years and I haven't drawn a comic about them and oh my god where did the time go. Maybe we'll see Wil again in the future! Or maybe not. It's not like there are 250 different characters in the comic and more being added all the time like some kind of Fire Emblem But For Goobers. Wait sh...

Directember: Emergency Summons

Clinton's enthusiasm for AI nonsense has led to some fun moments so far, like this one. With Claire moving to Cubetown I suspect there will be a lot more in the future.

Break has been nice so far! I've been doing a little doodling here and there, playing lots of guitar and video games, walking the dog...pretty much exactly what I normally do but without the constant pressure of having comics to draw. It's nice! But I'm also starting to look forward more and more to getting back to work....

Directember: Of Course She Uses Celsius

AI lore AND a cute Bubbles face? This is a perfect comic. I forgot about Faye’s old sleeveless hoodie, I should bring back that look now that it’s fall/winter in QC again. One of the many weird aspects of the comic’s pacing is how long it takes for seasons to change. The girls in particular went through multiple real-world summers’ worth of fashion trends over the course of the last in-comic summer. It’s super wild that as I write this, huge baggy jeans are back in style. I’m very...

Directember: Ring My Bell

The start of what would turn out to be the single biggest change in all of QC (thus far). God it does NOT feel like this strip is from 2 years ago already. Weren't they JUST meeting the Cubetown folks?!

I’ve said elsewhere that I originally imagined Marten and Claire moving up to Cubetown as a way to gently write them out of the comic, because they’d achieved a degree of stability and I was having more fun writing all the other characters. But then as I went through the whole visiti...

Directember: Savory Husks

Exceptionally cute Hanners in this one. Good job, past me. One of the funny parts of making over 5000 comics is how I don’t actually remember a lot of them, but somehow I can keep the continuity (mostly) straight in my head. I do frequently have to comb through my own archive (and occasionally the QC fan wiki, lol) to make sure I’m not getting something wrong, and sometimes it happens. But I’ve come to terms with that- it’s basically inevitable, and I can always fix any ...

Directember: Penalization

I have no insightful comments about this one, I just think Pintsize throwing his own head at Marten is a very funny gag. I always imagined his “skin” feeling like those shitty rubber-coated ballpoint pens you use at banks or car dealerships or the like. And I guess all his processing stuff was in his old body? But sometimes not? I played it pretty fast and loose with the robot stuff for the first few thousand comics. God every part of that phrase is weird when you really think about it. M...

Directember: Nice

You know, I never did return to the “Faye is building Pintsize a big metal dick and balls” plot point. I should probably address that eventually. Or let it sit on the back burner for another 8 years, only for it to become a critically important plot device in 2032-era QC. Will QC still be going in 2032? Will civilization?

I like Faye's short hair here. I was also drawing her a lot thiccer back then. I should go back to that. It's cute. So far I have done very little drawing...

Pissing Off The Punks

Some more old-school QC. I like how Pintsize’s “British” reveals that he doesn’t actually know anything about Britain beyond the easy stereotypes. I think the serif font is a cute touch. Also I had forgotten how emo Marten’s whole aesthetic used to be! Or that he apparently has severe scoliosis (I promise not all of these retrospective posts will be me dunking on my own art, but probably a lot of them will be). I stand by my Sex Pistols take. Buncha mediocre edgelords. Do not email ...

Glorified SNES Cartridge

The underground robot fighting ring! God, talk about a story that went some unexpected places. Corpse Witch turned out to be an ACTUAL VILLAIN! Bubbles turned out to be more than a one-note gag character! Yay shows up and does Yay things for the first time! Sometimes you have one small idea (Faye needs a new job) and it ends up completely altering the course of the story. Writing serialized fiction is weird.

For a long time I had sort of shied away from the robot stuff in the strip- I w...

Heck Of A View

The space station arc! Definitely the most ambitious thing I had attempted in the comic at that point, and honestly beyond my capabilities at the time. But that’s how you grow- you bite off more than you can chew, and you fuckin figure out how to chew it anyway. And then you choke a little and cough bits of food all over the place and everyone at the restaurant stares at you and you realize that the metaphor has escaped containment and is rampaging through the countryside. I forgot where I ...