I felt sad when I drew that third panel. Almost like I wanted to reach into it, give her a hug and tell her everything was going to be OK. 🙁

Something I’ve been noticing about the direction of the strip that worries me a tad is that it doesn’t seem to take much for me to fall victim to what is called Cerebus Syndrome. For those of you who’ve never heard of it, it’s the tendency of a cartoonist to start off all wacky and slowly end up very serious. Dave Sim is a cartoonist that is known for his comic book Cerebus the Aardvark, which was intended as a spoof of Conan but, over 300 issues, became a very weighty epic dealing with politics, religion and other mature matters. Don’t get me wrong, Sim did great work, but I don’t want MeatShield to end up like that, where it becomes like the D&D version of For Better or For Worse.

Don’t worry, only a little bit more of the serious stuff and we’ll get back to Dhur walking through a screen door or something. 🙂

Take care,

~Rob

P.S. In case you’re one of those readers that wonders how all these names are supposed to be pronounced, I recently updated the Pronunciation Guide with Mari and Sora’s names, as well as their titles. So, we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.