Happy Halloween

For once I'm actually equally excited to write the commentary as I was when I made the strip itself! This is it, the big Halloween Party. I feel like there could have been more lead-up, and I definitely had some ideas for other strips, but when it came down to it it didn't seem like any of them were working, and I think it was because I was about finished with this storyline thing. For the time being, anyway. There's another one that could be pretty decent, but we'll have to see.

So costumes! I loved thinking these up and drawing them. Some of the costumes may seem a little strange, and that's probably because they were hastily thrown together after I'd used up all my good ideas. Others were just obvious the moment I thought about it, and those are probably my favorites.

Why is Puppy dressed in a Kuribo's Shoe? Well, for one, that was basically the point of playing Mario 3, and for another, the idea was just too damn cute to pass up. I mean, look at her, pokin' her little head above the boot! It's adorable, and you know it.

Plus it goes perfect with Dido's soccer ball costume. Originally I was going to go with a scruffy red wig and a dodecahedron's equivalent of Edward's getup from Cowboy Bebop, because I wanted something that definitely came from the real world. Dido's been there, and apparently that means every aspect of its character must now reflect this fact? But then I thought it would be ridiculously easy to get a dodecahedron to look like a soccer ball.

It wasn't; actually, it was a hell of a process, but only because I was an idiot for a while. I started trying to alternate black and white on Dido's faces, which is a ludicrous plan. Then I made copies of all its faces, shrunk them, and tried to draw hexagons between those, which almost worked, except the mini-pentagons would need to be upside-down in reference to Dido's faces for that to work. In the end, though, the process of drawing and centering those miniature inverted pentagons in perspective was my favorite part of the whole deal. Plus now there's cute-boot back there kicking Dido around, which just sets me to chuckling.

The Buddha is dressed as a ghost, which comes from the original plan for the costumes, months ago, which was "everyone dresses as the jack-o-lantern from the encyclopedia except The Buddha, who dresses as a classic two-holes-in-a-bedsheet ghost". Because I thought it would be funny for The Buddha to display his omniscience by dressing as something totally appropriate to the holiday that only someone aware of all possible universes would know about, but at the same time be unable to think of anything more creative than "ghost". Now, though, he's a Pac-man ghost, and is making two separate puns: one for gamers, and one for Buddhists. This pleases me.

Poor Brock. He's trying to explain his table costume, but I guess everyone beat him to the punch. (Get it? 'Cause they put the punch bowl on him.) Honestly I just couldn't think of a costume for Brock, which is okay because he's exactly the kind of guy who wouldn't be able to think of a good costume for himself. And "table" is just bafflingly stupid enough to be the perfect costume for him.

I'm pretty sure the only thing Otto has ever seen that wasn't just one of the other Polytopes was Dido as a ninja. Which is stranger still, because it now occurs to me that Otto never saw Dido dressed as a ninja. There was this whole revenge vibe with that, but now I'm too busy wondering who tipped Otto off to explore it much further.

No one is surprised that Ike came dressed as a tesseract. If you are surprised, visit the archives, because you haven't read the other strips up to this point. This is one of those ones that just leapt out at me and had to be done.

Speaking of which! Oh man! Today's going to have to be a two-parter! Because I just thought of a fantastic costume idea for Tess.