It finally happens…
Well…after 2 years and almost 600 pages…they finally kiss.
I want you all to know this was all for you “shippers” out there who poked and prodded all these years for it to happen.
I promised myself I wouldn’t let you guys influence me to alter the story in any way. But I had no idea how much of an affect their misfortunes of bad timing and wrong words said was going to frustrate you even moreso than it was Nastajia.
I decided to “speed up” the relationship to have the kiss happen here.
The story still continues on. I just have to re-write some dialog later on. But I think this will be fun to see how the relationship moves from now on.
I hope you enjoy this new chapter. I did it for you guys (except for those of you who wanted Felicity and Alex together. Sorry)
😛
And also. I wanted you guys to know I updated the Topwebcomics vote incentive with a new Animated Gif. This time with Kiwi.
If any of you know how to get the frame rate higher. I’d appreciate it.
I’m using Adobe Image Ready.
Again. Thank you all. This page is for you.
OMG! Yes!
Hahaha!
** cue Beavis and Butthead ** Huh huh huh huh. He SCORED!
Congrats to Alexander who finally managed to stay in Dreamland at the right time. Of course, if he poofed out right now, Nastajia is going to be left standing there miffed again.
(evil grin >:-D )
Yay! Love it!
Thanks, Scott! 🙂
I do love a good romantic story with lots of dragons and mountains of corpses! 😀
Scott, this is where I’d say ‘marry me’, but I understand you’re already taken. And I ain’t no homewrecker. Plus I prefer the ladies.
So. Scott. I love you…in a perfectly platonic, you’re awesome like Elven Awesome, kinda way.
I’m just waiting to see what the rest of the cast’s reaction to the kiss will be.
Seeing as they’re like half a deck away right now. 🙂
Sheesh. Finally.
Speed up? Glad you did. The last thing webcomics need, collectively, is yet another Userfriendly AJ/Miranda or GPF Nick/Ki dynamic.
Here’s to a comic that refuses to be yet another badge-engineered, four-door, front-drive, V6 sedan on the “Information Superhighway”.
Wohooow finally! This imposes a new problem, I you love someone in dreamland, would you try to sleep as much as possible in real-life?
Hey Scott, great work man! Have you ever considered letting your work translate into multiple languages?
Heh,
For a moment there, I thought he was going to wake up after the “I wont ever leave you again” line.
I actually thought it came a little abrupt… I mean they don’t have much in common anymore. Its been so long. I know that an old flame, never dies… but now I can’t help to think that its just because Nastajia rally needs this…
and also the AJ/Miranda thing… it took 8-10 years?
hehe, thats a drag…
…Tee
Wow. As always you have left us with another spectacular piece of a great story. Thanks Scott.
Awww, very cute. But I agree with Troels that it might have come a bit abrubtly. No matter how friendly they were as children, they barely know each other now. I would have preferred waiting to see if they actually hit it of. Now I am waiting to see the divorce in three years time. 😉
ABOUT TIME!!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!! I have to tell ya, you just KNEW there was some frustrating chemistry going on and with the whole situation at hand, you HAVE to relieve some of that tension. What better way than to kiss the guy (or girl in my case lol) that you’re smitten over?! Frelling great page to see today Scott!
I can finally have a happy moment today. Now, back to drawing comic strips lol.
Later Scott, congrats on the new twist to the storyline (As you said you’ll have to rewrite dialog later on.)
See ya on the boards
Jon
I don’t see how it was too rushed for a mere kiss. The mutual feelings have already been firmly established. It was clear the moment that adult Alexander laid eyes on Nastajia, he was smitten and those childhood feelings came flooding back with some adult feelings of attraction to boot. For Nastajia, she was already in love with Alexander as a little girl and when he disappeared, it nearly destroyed her. She was only able to go on by burying all of her feelings, but when he came back, it created an enormous turmoil within her. She just needed some re-assurance that Alexander wanted to stay and that it was because of her that he wanted to stay.
Yay!!!! ::tears up:: Awww…. I’m so happy. I’ve wanted them to kiss for so long and I’m very glad they did today.
This must be awkward for Paddington since he’s like 10 feet away and he can’t move.
Great comic! Thanks!
I must say “Hooray!” Now I’m trying to think of ways that Alex might stay in Dreamland longer than a night’s sleep. His brain waves cease when he’s in Dreamland, maybe he can learn types of meditation to force his brain waves to cease at will? Got the idea from a you tube vid “Ken Wilber Stops His Brain Waves.”
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!! *dance*
Firstly, YAY!! Finally 🙂
Secondly, if you’re using Adobe ImageReady there should be timing options in the animation bar under each frame. I’m not sure how to get it much faster if the frame timing is already set at 0 or at No Delay, but that’s what I would suggest if you haven’t done that already. That’s about the extent of my knowledge.
Sometimes an animated gif will go slower upon first loading and then speed up since all the images have loaded.
Out of curiosity how many frames are in that animation? You should be able to select them all and change the timing instead of changing them individually as well.
awww <3
I’ve found that the best way to do gifs in Image Ready is just to have lots of frames; the ones I make that show movement usually have quite a few at about .2seconds a piece to give it a smoother flow. It makes them seem slower, but its what I’ve found that works best : /
Definite animation candidate. Looong animation. Unless you are going to have Alexander go *poof*. Hmmm, that could be interesting anyway in the storyline, but then I’m not in charge of that.
abrupt??? It took 2 frames to catch up to the pirates, but 2 weeks to get around to that frame? Yer losin me man.
Yeppers, we were ready for that. Poor girl has been wanting to kiss him like forever! But how do you maintain a relationship that includes a freaky disappearing act…? Agian, superb comic.
Whatever. I think he should have poofed out.
On a different note, why has he been purple in this whole scene? Nobody else is a weird color…
I want to know if you can animate this scene to bug a fellow fan I know simply because right now she can’t tell if they’re “chewing each other’s lips” (her words) or not. :evilgrin:
As the “fellow fan” from Alex’s post, I BEG you: Don’t animate this strip! Please! At least, if you do, don’t make it graphic!
I can’t stand movies that do close ups on the main characters kissing, please don’t do this to me!
Thank you all. I’m so glad you liked it (or most of you at least…ha ha)
I wish I could reply to all of you…but it’s tough on this blog.
Feel free to poke your head into the Forum and I’ll do my best to interact a bit more.
But for now. Thank you and hope you continue to enjoy the ride.
The Girls all agree this is a great moment, and one they have all been waiting for!
The Boys – not so sure. “Ugh!” was the most common thing from them, but they are younger.
The Mom is quite happy to have that tension finally ended!
(and agrees this probably shouldn’t be animated. It stands very nicely on its own!)
Beautiful, Scott. I’m all verklempt! Talk amongst yourselves…
To Cassy, Trich and fellow Dreamers:
Dreamers, as they’re called, are usually pretty good at what people in white coats sometimes call time dilation. The better the condition of your mind and body, the better your control over it. Almost everyone has had a dream that seemed to last an entire day’s time, but only took up a few minutes in realtime.
The movie “Waking Life” approaches this subject, among others.
What this could mean for Alexander is love spurs him to stop being a slacker and he starts to excel in his own Waking Life.
Anyone can learn lucid dreaming (heck, I started at age four), but he’s got a very strong motivator urging him to master it, now. If Alex can learn Dream Re-Entry, he’ll have a huge advantage.
Something tells me Scott is a Dreamer, himself. Who knows what the future may hold?
DC Peavey
Live gamertag: InY0urDr34m5
Okay, I screwed up my gamertag in my last post. That “o” is supposed to be a zero.
The kingdom still needs a new “human” king. I suspect that Alex will find a way to permanently live in Dreamland and will visit Earth with a special teleport key… or maybe never again?
The deal with the .gif is that it’s 61 frames long and should probably be more like 25 or 30 maximum. There’s not enough movement between the frames at the max speed a .gif will play for it to be the speed you want.
I was going to make an example to prove my point, but Imageready just crashed when I hit the browser preview, so never mind 😀 The main problem I had trying to fix it was Kiwi’s wings being a four frame loop, which limited the frames I could remove without totally ruining it, but I cut it down to two frames and it looked okay.
That’s my suggestion, fewer frames.
sweet voting bonus and as a long time reader, it would be truly cruel if you had him shift back right then, to both of them.
I agree with SparcMan – the chemistry has been building for a really long time. It’s a good time for a first kiss.
Now they’ve got to do the hard part and figure out their relationship…
awww yay! about time!! it’s cute though!
Felicity and Alex? That would never work out! But Felicity and Nastija on the other hand… mmmhhh! ^_^
Yay 🙂
I could not deal with another web comic that strung me out for ages and ages. The kiss was perfectly timed imo 🙂
I appreciate Scott’s sensitivity to the tension that was building among the “shippers”, but I have always been one who prefers an artist/writer be left along to tell *his* story, and not the story that the masses think they want to hear (which often is much blander and less exciting than a well plotted story written by good author).
As for whether this was rushed or not, you have to remember that the passage of time in the story does not correlate one-to-one with the number of comics.
Time speeds up and slows down depending on what is happening. A lot of comics for a short period of time when very interesting things are happening, and fewer comics (or even panels) covering a longer time when nothing of great interest is happening (such as in scene transitions).
Once you read the comic in print form, this becomes a non-issue and is part of the pacing of a good book. But when you only get one page a day and have to keep waiting for each step in a detailed scene, it seems much longer and more frustrating that when reading in book form.
I wonder if holding posting pages for several days in order to post several at once to present a complete sequence at once would be a solution to this problem?
Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner
“TGIF”