NINJA EDIT: Man, looking through the older commentaries, I realize they they all had comments posted, and while I did read them all, I didn't reply to any of them. I'm such a dong. Well, I WILL reply to comments made to this entry. That is a promise.
'

The whole Chupacabre crisis was brushed upon in Chapter 1, expanded in Chapter 2, and in this Chapter, it finally collides with the story of the two girls. Providing such a setup is one of the many things I was new at when I started this comic.

( CHAPTER 3 UNDER THE CUT )

Chapter 2
Chapter 1

Looking back on this chapter, I notice that it took a while to get going. Whether this was planned, or if I was having trouble getting it started, I'm not sure. The first several comics don't even have jokes in them, which is pretty odd. I mean, I don't typically try to force jokes out if they're not needed, but usually there will be at least one in a series of five comics!
But yeah, the first set of strips in Chapter II was mostly re-establishing what was going on, which may have been a good thing. As I've learned, people tend to easily forget about what's going on when reading webcomics.

( on cats and pants and adventure )

Chapter 1's annotations are here

Ah, the first chapter. I didn't know anything about what I was doing, except that the girls would eventually get together somehow. I did not draw comic #1 thinking that I was ever going to draw over 500 more of these.
Naturally, if I were to go back and start this again, knowing what I'd know now, I'd do pretty much everything differently. Otra started out a bit Mary-Sue-ish, with her standing around all deadpan, fighting stereotypical idiots with random violence, and why was she so sad? Did she have a hard life, or not? Who knows! I obviously didn't.



...and then three strips later...


Oh well. Eventually, I decided she had an overbearing-but-well-meaning mother that made her into an overacheiver, as well as a job that kept her isolated, and a general feeling that her life didn't shape up the way she wanted it to... but at the time, it was important that she was sad. Thus, we have Winter to fix that.

Winter was designed to be ultra-feminine. She was, after all, a product of the union of two girls. Thus, she was given the floofy dress, cute little expressions like "My!", and curvy curves that got curvier as I learned how to draw better. As for her personality.. Well, she was nuts and stuff. Winter's kind of a hard character to develop, but these days, I like a nice challenge.

Chapter 1 was only 25 strips long, and most of them were drawn as "Singles" (I'll get to that later). The comic was less complicated back then, and one thing I will give these older stories is that they didn't take much effort to follow. Chapter 1: Otra meets Winter, she lets her stay at her place. Somewhere out there, Chuy is satisfying a bunch of women. The end. Kind of a Big contrast to Chapter 11 where EVERYTHING is happening with EVERYBODY and this is going on while that is going on and then HUGE FIGHT and yay the end.


It also had more narration than the other chapters. Put simply, I had recently finished reading Mal's Lost at Sea book, and I wanted to try my hand at that kind of narrative storytelling. Sometimes it worked, but at other times (like in this example), it was pretty unnecessary. Eventually it got phased out, since the comic went in a direction where it wasn't needed at all anymore.

One of the basic ideas of Girly was that this comic was essentially going to be Cutewendy with more form and structure, so one thing I knew right away was that I wanted it to actually take place somewhere. Wendy took place in some house in the middle of nowhere, and Cutewendy was located in some nondescript city. For Girly, I created Cute-town (not really caring about how strange this name might be percieved by new readers), gave it Dallas's skyline, and its own series of colorful residents. Later on I added a college, a park, a business district, an arboretum, and a downtown area very similar to Austin's. I'm pretty fond of the town now, and it's among the reasons the comic ended up going on significantly longer than I intended it to.

A great deal of Chapter 1 was pretty unplanned. I couldn't think of a way to end one of the comics, so I drew an elephant causing a traffic accident, and got a series of comics out of it, as well as one of the comic's main recurring jokes. The elephants were the first "villain" of the comic, and Chuy was the main boss. His introduction ties in to another new aspect I wanted to include in the comic, which was the presentation of multiple viewpoints and side-stories that would eventually collide with the story of the two girls. And so, we have Chuy... and the CutePD.


I can't really remember what made me decide to make Chuy the kind of villain he ended up being; I guess this was just where my mind was. Hey, I wanted the comic to be a romance, so let's have the villain's weapon be... ROMANCE. That was probably it. Hey, I think it worked all right. Anyway, this is one character who looked completely different than he does now. He didn't really look like a man before, and I pretty much blame anime for that. His cape was ridiculous, but I'd keep that the same. I probably would even keep the strange outfit Otra first appeared in the same as well. This comic completely unintentionally ended up being, in part, an allegory for superheroism, so having outfits like this in the early strips actually seems really appropriate.


Anyway, back to the girls. The chapter ended with a big dream sequence presented as a Double. Single strips were drawn in a 3"x9" area at 600dpi (later increased to 1200), and Doubles were twice that long. As you can see, they're actually two single strips stacked on top of each other. Originally I was only going to do Doubles on special occasions. Ha! Nowadays Doubles are the norm, and Singles tend to only come up when I need a breather.
I can imagine several people let out a collective sigh at comic #25. "Jesus Christ... Will he get over the lesbians already", right? I admit I was a bit obsessed, but like I said... Girly's intention was to make a solid story based around the things I always do, and that includes the lesbians, apparently. But nowadays I don't even think much about it. They way they are is just the way they are.
Personally, I think #25 is one of of the weakest moments in Girly, due to it having the subtlety of ten thousand screaming, exploding hedgehogs. I'm sure that wth my current talents, I could come up with a way for Otra to have a totally gay dream about Winter that isn't simply a dream about HOTTT SEXXX. And it was pretty pandery to boot. At least it probably frustrated a lot of people hoping to see a scene like this again, which never really happens. Ha ha.

Marshmallow Kitty did not appear in this chapter.