March 2022 (Page 432 Finished)

Wow, it took almost a year, but it's here, an FH page finally completed, up here for you guys now and will be public on the 29th of this month. Stupid that it took this long, lots of reasons for it I guess but I'm tired of excuses so I'll just go over some background trivia kind of stuff.

Firstly, the white-tailed deer maitre d' guy here isn't a randomly-generated character. I'm pretty sure that, in the script for this page I posted here ages ago, I said that I specifically was going to make them a deer, mostly cause I was interested in drawing a deer character. Still was at this point. I think he came out okay with the platinum blonde hair and deer nose/lip. He doesn't have proper antlers here because it's spring in the comic's time, so he's sporting nubs covered in velvet. Despite not being randomly-generated, I haven't given him a name and didn't really plan on it, even though he appears in the next page. Maybe if he comes back in any notable role later.

The menu board behind the maitre d' alludes to the minor joke concerning the restaurant as a whole, which is that it's trying to pass off as a fancy high-end French restaurant but is actually pretty lower-end. The name of the restaurant is "L'Maison de Bouffe", which translates to "The Food House", and the menu items on the board are mostly just typical diner food translated into French. Also, despite there being stacks of paper money in the last panel, the currency is still "credits" in this universe, as denoted by the "cr" abbreviations on the board for prices. I already had a coin appear in Bruce's wallet a while ago, I think it's okay to still have physical money around despite the implication of a futuristic card-based currency.

The painting on the wall is a weird one, because it's actually a recreation of a painting seen in Yahtzee Croshaw's 5 Days a Stranger game, which you can see in this screencap: https://lparchive.org/The-Chzo-Mythos/Update%2003/2-capture_22032010_222350_copy.png It was a SPOOKY painting because the silhouette you see in the background would appear and disappear. There's no intended spookiness with the painting in the comic page, though, nor any real reason for me using it beyond needing some painting to go on the wall and that one coming to mind and being easy to recreate.

Beyond that, there's not a whole lot else to say about this page now. I did rewrite some of the dialogue and the title of the page since the sketch preview last year, biggest one maybe being throwing out the word "overruled". I'm not sure what the actual proper terminology is for when a reservation/appointment gets replaced by someone else's, but 'overruled' sounded weird and I guess 'overwritten' seemed closer.

Anyway, like I said, this page will go public on the 29th of this month, that gives me a fair amount of time to hopefully work on the next page for April. Again, I'm really sorry for the latest in a long series of hiatuses and delays and other dumb things. I don't really want to promise I'll get back to a consistent schedule from here on out because I can't trust myself at this point to be able to fulfill it, but I'll try at least. Thank you for sticking with this over the months, I always appreciate it.