Wow, seven weeks? How did that happen?

Monday, Strip 31 -- Peggat-ante seemed a suitable Star Warsy-version of penny-ante. Another alternative, decicred or microcred, sounded too clumsy. A peggat is a unit of Tatooine -- and presumably Huttese -- currency.

Not surprisingly, to Raal, a professional gambler, stuff always comes down to luck.

Tuesday, Strip 32 -- A bounty hunter with a sense of morality? Yeah, I don't like playing too much to type.

Wednesday, Strip 33 -- Back to Kestrel. Note the position of one of the moons in the background. It's meant to suggest time passage when compared to Friday's strip, though it occurs to me I probably exaggerated it a bit much.

We're in some cruddy alleyway on Ord Mantell here, and Kestrel's making her way to an address -- #21 -- a none-too-subtle tip-off as to who arranged this get-together.

As she passes by #21, she spots a datapad on the ground (it's kind of hard to make out on panel 2, but that's it sitting in the moonlight). It's of course very clear in panel 3 as she crouches to pick it up.

Thursday, Strip 34 -- I love widescreen full-frame panels, partly for cinematic reasons, but mostly because I'm lazy and they're easier to draw.

"Those coordinates" refer to the datapad she's picked up. I took care to make it a different shape, since there's a rather large amount of datapads being featured in this story.

A bit more of Kestrel's motivations are revealed here.

Friday, Strip 35 And just like that, poof, he's gone.

Kestrel makes her way back. The moon moves. Time passes. And someone else is due for an appointment...

Some feedback...

Ah ha! I finally placed Raal: he's nearly identical to the Court Fop in Heroes & Rogues, though I'm not sure that the background fits... Was this intended, like Smiley and the Annoying Squib, or did you just decide to reuse the character appearance?

Sort of... and nice catch. Both Raal and Smiley had existed before their inclusion in Heroes and Rogues in my own works. Smiley was transported almost exactly into the book -- except his name was always intended to be Smileredon-Verdonté ... but WEG's formatting dropped the special character é from the manuscript, so he's now forever known as Smileredon-Verdont. I wrote and illustrated the Annoying Squib template.

The Court Fop was not my character -- someone else wrote that template. But I got to illustrate it. I just stuck Raal into there, as a way of putting him in some official artwork, but Raal isn't really a court fop. But I have no doubt he's played one in some sort of scam in his past.

Hehe that CZ-3 is kind of cute somehow

Vacant wall-eyed stares can be very endearing, as Ren and Stimpy has shown.

Raal and Sammie are my new favorite SW characters, honestly. I love those guys and this series! Maybe one day they'll pop up in other EU! Keep up the great work!

There's a secret key to writing them. I just imagine The Big Lebowski, my favorite movie... In that, the supposedly laid back guy is the guy who's frazzled the most by his friends. Same thing with Raal. For the cool cucumber, he has easily frayed nerves. I guess that makes Smiley "Donny," which given that his small legs means he has to walk behind the other two, isn't that far off.

Strip 31 has a very strong Calvin & Hobbes aspect to it (particularly in the third panel). It's great to see you appreciate Watterson's work. He's my all-time favorite comics artist/writer and I think his characters will live on forever (though I still sorely miss them). The new archival collection is worth its weight in gold. That said, I am really warming up to Raal and his companions and we've just barely started!

I admired Watterson for what he did to the Sunday page. He refused to follow the standard choppable template that lets newspapers hack up Sunday strips to conform to whatever tiny page space they want. Instead, he painted solid blocks of artwork that they had to run at full proportion. That rocked.

And especially good (annotations are) for someone like me who hasn't read up on a lot of the West End Games stuff.

... not to say at all that you cant just pick up and enjoy the strip with no backstory.

Good! My goal is to make the story completely readable on the surface level, even if you don't catch all the little references. But they're there for those who really dig 'em too.

See ya next week when Rookies hits the big 4-0!