I think I had drawn in the characters for this strip, and then realized that they were on the wrong sides of the bench, and so I lettered the strip BACKWARDS. Since I didn’t own a computer back then, I had Kinkos photocopy it onto a transparency, and then I photocopied that from the reverse side to get the final image. Which is why the lettering looks weird.
“WHAT?” you’re asking, how could you not have had a computer for a webcomic back then? Well, it was 1996 or so and my friend in California had a computer, scanner, and website (sans content), and I had none. So i would actually draw the strip and then SNAIL-mail a hard copy to him, which he’d put online. Fortunately after a year or so this horribly tedious process ended when I finally got computer access.
I didn’t have a computer in 1996 either. Or any kind of internet access.
Why didn’t you just letter it *after* doing the reversal?
So I took a screenshot of this page and flipped it in Paint to see what that would look like, but now I’m just hopelessly cross-eyed.
You did a pretty good job of writing in reverse. I can’t even write forwards that well. :D
Ordinary ink and pencils tend to smear on transparency. learned this when I was an apprentice draughtsman and I had to redo several architectural drawings that I had done in ordinary ink and pencil on transparency plastic, which architects and engineers did their draughting on before CAD. For some reason they forgot to tell us this important titbit at college and the architect I was apprenticing with assumed I knew it.