Why So Serious?

A costume cap?  An oblivious cap?  Yup, its a cap for Angel!

So I owed Angel a cap.  Without looking at her preferences, I knew what i wanted.  She has just returned from Otakon 2011, and is into cos play.  Specifically Kigurumi.  If you want to know what the differences are, head on over to her blog, as she does a far better job than me at describing it.   So I figured I would do some sort of costume cap.

My initial search was for sexy costumes, but all that really got me was a bunch of pictures of sexy women modeling costumes for costume shops. Fun, but not what I was looking for.  So I switched up my search terms to include comicon figuring it would give me more of what I was after.  I found several images of women in costume at a show of some sort, but none sparked me until I saw this one.

Being a woman dressed up in a male character's costume really worked for me.  Plus it hit me that this would be a perfect 'Oblivious' cap, which Angel also likes.  So I cropped it down and went to writing.  I always find humor in this style of cap, so I let that naturally flow out.  I had intended on getting the actually phrase 'Why So Serious?' in the story, but it just didn't fit.  The story came amazingly easy.  Honestly I was surprised that I didn't struggle more with it.  And about 3/4 the way through, I had to start wrapping it up, as I was sure I could go on longer. I would have taken it further, but I only had the one image to work with, and it really would have just been more of the same back and forth.

When I went to design it, I made sure to use different colors for each voice, as last time I did a conversational cap ("Read the instructions first"), I didn't do it.  I heard later that it was a little confusing and I didn't want that confusion to take away from this.  All I really had to do was find a background image, and I think I found a real winner:

So thats this cap.

I also wanted to mention that I've been thinking about this 'writers block'.  I'm starting to think that it may not be a block like I had in the past.  Its more of a lack of mood.  When I sit down to write, I seem to make good caps (at least from what I'm hearing from people).  The only thing that I've found myself unable to do, is write out a LONG cap.  But this year has been far more productive than last year was.

Last year I did 42 caps for trades at the Haven.  This year... I've already done 42.  And that doesn't include the few that I made as blog exclusives.  I think I first felt this 'block' in May of this year.  But since that time I've made 18 or so caps.  18 caps in 3 months isn't a bad average for me.

So, I will stop my whining about being in a slump, or having writers block.

That isn't to say that I'm happy with where I am at.  I still find myself wanting to write a LONG cap (between 4 and 10 panels) and any story I try, gets truncated down to a single or two panel cap.  I don't know what that stems from, or if its even something I should worry about.  People seem genuinely happy with my singles so far, and these are (at least to me) fairly un-inspired writing.

I'm still eight caps in debt.  That includes Jennifer who I will either write a good long story cap for, or a few good singles, and the challenge I received back in March.  It seems that the request at the Haven to not cap me didn't work out that well, as all of these caps I owe came in AFTER I put up that request.  So for now, I'm going to leave that request up.  I'll keep capping when I have the time, and if the recent trend keeps up, I should be out of debt in about 6 weeks.