You may be wondering: it took you all day to clean your apartment? Yes, yes it did. This wasn’t your typical Saturday afternoon tidy up. This was a deep, deep clean. I’m talking emptying out the fridge, scraping the inside of my oven with steel wool, washing my shower curtain - that kind of deep clean. I wanted to basically reset my apartment to how it was when I moved in (or even better) and that I did. But some things are just out of your control…
I had crossed paths with a couple cockroaches when I first moved in almost exactly one year ago, but didn’t think too much of it. My apartment is (seemingly) an old building and these sorts of things come with the territory. Plus, after a short time, the cockroaches stopped appearing! Through the fall, winter, and spring, I had forgotten about the initial pest sightings and lived in bliss. But as spring turned to summer, it brought more than just Texas heat. The cockroaches were back.
I don’t want to give the impression that I was suddenly besieged by hordes of roaches, but there was a marked increase in cockroach cameos over the summer - at least one cockroach sighting per week. Each encounter had its own unique obstacles and memorable aspects that I’ll recount in subsequent “Cockroach Diaries”, but the common denominator in all these stories is how instinctually panicked I get when I spot them. Pests seem to dig into an almost primal aversion and disgust for whatever reason and send me into a skittish fight-or-flight response. Me? I fight.
This comic was the first time I tried using a non-photo blue pencil. Turned out it was totally a regular photo blue pencil. I don’t know. Maybe my scanner was on the wrong setting or something. Non-photo blue pencils are common tools in comics illustration to create a preliminary sketch of the scene. In theory, you can ink right over the blue penciling with abandon because the blue won’t get picked up by the scanner. Mine did. I spent many, many hours trying to figure out how to remove them in GIMP. I read that there was a simple way to do it in Photoshop, and the simple way to do it in GIMP required the use of a plug-in that currently doesn’t work with the latest version of the software. I stressfully troubleshooted different alternatives and discovered a remarkably easy solution that was somehow not noted in any of the forums I had scoured. Extracting the blue channel from the RGB color profile of the image makes the blue lines - you guessed it - disappear! It seems like common sense, but when you’re in the thick of things, you tend to follow the path of least resistance which, in this case, was to blindly follow every suggestion I could find online. At the end of the day, I am now a believer in the blue pencil.
This was a fun one to make because it had a clear finish line. I knew exactly how it would end and what the “punch line” would be. With that set in stone, I had free rein to pick out the exact frames for each snapshot of the cleaning montage. Interestingly, I changed the order of the panels and even reshot some reference photos as I drew the comic. I wanted there to be a flow to how the reader’s eye moved across the page. For example, the second row starts with me on panel left, then center, the panel right. I’m all about that symmetry. I also tried to maintain some variety throughout the montage, but in retrospect, I think I could have used another close-up (or at least something on the scale of me dusting in panel 3).
While I’m having fun doing these, I really hope that this particular series doesn’t go on for too long. Otherwise I’ll need to call an exterminator.