Free Spirit "Hallowinnie II: Season of the Witch" Talkback

[Peter Paltridge]

http://www.platypuscomix.net/freespirit/index.php?issue=13&page=1&seriesID=13

The cliffhanger feels like your average, garden-variety ghost story, but trust me, this is going somewhere interesting. Not where you think. I knew the Halloween story had to be a special one, and I've skipped every Halloween leading up to this one because I didn't have the idea yet. Now I do.

I spent several months trying to decide the best costume possibilities for each of them. I settled on Jessie as Miraculous Ladybug, Robb as a jellyfish (don't ask me where this came from, I just love how pathetic it looks) and Gene and Winnie teaming up as Banjo and Kazooie, with Winnie as Kazooie being pulled along in this gigantic backpack bigger than Gene is. What you can't see is a board with wheels underneath the sack, which is how Gene can pull Winnie along. It was cut off by the text.

Also note that their costumes somehow disappear one by one as they become impractical to the events; you can see Robb taking his off but who knows where the rest went. Maybe they removed them between panels. Or a wizard did it.

 

[Peter Paltridge]

I swear to God, this is coming -- I have four unfinished pages in front of me. Part 2 is very long, and I got socked with moving and ten thousand other tasks of adulting to deal with. Just yesterday I spent the morning working, the afternoon helping my dad, and the evening doing nothing because the power was out in my apartment. Then I got the election results and now I don't feel like drawing for obvious reasons, but I'm going to push through it. Just not this afternoon because that's taken up with something else.

I HATE that it is November 9 already.

 

[Peter Paltridge]

http://www.platypuscomix.net/freespirit/index.php?issue=13&page=12&seriesID=13
And now you've met Free Spirit's first original character! What do you think of her?

When thinking about the rules that had been established for this world, I thought "what if there was someone who had managed to fight those rules? Someone who somehow learned all about magic independently?" She was supposed to be a Doc Brown type, but she seems more subdued here. Then I thought about what her motives would be, and that it would be interesting if we met this person later in her life when she had been through a lot....There is still more, which you'll find out about later.

There was a half-finished script about Winnie and Jessie running into a (human) witch hunter that had to be dropped thanks to this story.

My original idea for the twist two-thirds of the way through would be that she let a monster loose and they had to stop it from getting to the town and destroying it.....but I wasn't feeling the stakes there. I realized it was because I hadn't established anybody outside of the Harper family yet, so you couldn't feel anything for the people you didn't know out there. The source of tension had to be localized.

Maye the monster could be a threat to Winnie specifically. And then I thought, "What if THIS is what a witch hunter is?" And that sounded awesome....but it meant that other story had to be thrown out. The parts that were written will just have to be used in other stories. The ending panel here is actually my ending panel idea for that story.

 

[Dsneybuf]

And now you've met Free Spirit's first original character! What do you think of her?

Certainly intriguing. If I didn't have so many other sources of sadness right now, I'd await learning more about her in the future.

 

[Dsneybuf]

Kind of annoying anecdote: Recently, someone edited the TV Tropes page about the Free Spirit TV show, with a plug for the "very well-received" webcomic. I took this as a sign of the possibility that the comic has more than three fans, and asked the Troper if he/she had proof of such. He/she didn't answer, not even after I repeated the question. Whether this means that the Troper didn't have such proof, lost the evidence, or just doesn't read PMs, I don't know. I don't even know whether or not to count the Troper as a fourth fan.

 

[Peter Paltridge]

Kind of annoying anecdote: Recently, someone edited the TV Tropes page about the Free Spirit TV show, with a plug for the "very well-received" webcomic. I took this as a sign of the possibility that the comic has more than three fans, and asked the Troper if he/she had proof of such. He/she didn't answer, not even after I repeated the question. Whether this means that the Troper didn't have such proof, lost the evidence, or just doesn't read PMs, I don't know. I don't even know whether or not to count the Troper as a fourth fan.

More than three people read Free Spirit; they just don't stop by to say anything. Comments and feedback are hard to get in this modern web, which is why I appreciate yours.

Also, to everyone else: I hate working for a vacuum.