This is just awful.  I can safely say that this is among my worst comics—possibly the worst, in terms of the artwork.  The hell of it is that panels 1 and 2 would be okay if I hadn’t done such a horrible job drawing Penny’s face.  And man, did I do a bad job.  She looks like she’s wearing some sort of horrifying spirit mask.

So, yeah, I said I was going to fix the really bad ones, but it turns out that those two panels are so integrated that the only way to fix them is to completely redraw them from scratch.  I’m working on it, but I wanted to keep to my every-Friday-update schedule, and I ran out of time.  I will eventually replace that one with the update, but not right now.  Right now, all I can say is that women, children and those with weak hearts (or stomachs) should feel free to scroll down without looking.

Starting today, Fridays here will be known as Casual Friday. I’ll be reposting the old Casual Notice comics, one per Friday, with commentary. Depending on my mood, I may redraw one or two of the more horrifying ones, and I may even fill in some of the gaps where I went on unexplained hiatus (the explanation is I’m lazy).

So, above, you see the very first Casual Notice comic. A lot of people (who mostly exist in my head and nowhere else) ask me how I came up with Casual Notice as a title. I started using CN as a handle on forums and chat boxes (remember when websites had chat boxes?) back when Avalon High went on its long hiatus. People were bitching on the chat box there about the author’s disappearance, and I registered as CasualNotice to remark that unless they had specific information that his life was hunky-dory they didn’t know that he wasn’t facing some sort of crisis. I kind of liked the idea of being a person who just remarked on things I’ve noted in passing, so I kept the handle and used it for other forums.

As far as the comic goes, the concept expanded from there.  I knew I couldn’t maintain a comic that had a point, so I decided from the getgo, that it would be a slice of life comic, and any commentary would be merely in passing.  Originally, the comic was to be about Scot living with Schmookie (in human form) and not discovering that she was a dragon until much later in the comic.  The bestiality aspect of that gave me issues, so, instead, I had a small family that I’d created for a series of unpublished short stories, and decided to start with the family’s daughter (Penelope) as Scots roommate/love interest.

This first comic, of course, came from the Houston Chronicle’s decision to rename its Houston section with a graphic of a star.  The idea of the Print media trying to compete with electronic media has always been hilarious to me.  What print media used to do very well, better than any instantaneous medium ever could, was edit, vet and fact-check their stories.  If they’d stuck with that and highlighted it’s value, newspapers and magazines wouldn’t be in the crisis that they are.  Of course, they decided they needed to compete with electronic media in an arena where they couldn’t hope to even show up for the fight (hipness), and you have the situation you have now.

To be fair, the Chronicle did finally add the word “Star” to the banner of its “Star” section, so this joke is a little dated.  The cat and the bird will not appear again until Hurricane Ike blows through town.