revisiting afterhour adjustments

a few days ago i re-read my comic for the first time since i initially shared it online late last year... i avoided it until now on purpose because i couldn't help but cringe whenever i looked at it. idk, something about sharing something so freaky yet so deeply personal with so many people made me worry so much about how others saw it, how others perceived me because of it, and every time i looked at it it brought those thoughts and feelings to the forefront of my mind. i swear this is a positive blog post please just stick with me jdhfg

anyway, recently i went to read it again, and those thoughts surfaced again - but this time i decided that that was dumb actually and made myself stare at the cover page until my brain realised that we were doing this and that it couldn't stop me this time. which. worked, surprisingly enough, the thoughts mostly shut up.

i still cringed a little as i was reading it, mostly because oeugh there's so many little things i'd do differently now. but! i also saw all the little details i put in there, all the sick artistic choices i made, and i felt.. proud of myself?

when i finish a large project, i usually don't get any sense of satisfaction out of it. it's done, in the past, irrelevant. i can stop thinking about it now. i only focus on what's next. which is, like, not ideal, and why i feel like it's important to set time aside to go revisit my projects sometimes, reflect on them, on all the specifics and decisions i made throughout the process of working on it. to let myself feel good about having made a thing. if my brain can't be proud of me, i'll do it myself.

backgrounds

i'll start with the backgrounds. they're usually so heavily obscured by the subjects and speech bubbles, but they're also easily what took me the most time throughout making this comic. i put so much work into each one! like, the very first panel is vaguely based on a street in prague i used to walk through on my way to work every day.

i think this was meant as like. pebble here is me at that time, walking home after being forced to work overtime yet again, knowing she'll have to go back in the morning in a few hours, having had no time to herself. like, what if instead some magical force intervened, changing her body forever in a way where she'd never be able to work again, all the while ensuring she wouldn't ever need to. the latter bit never got explored in the actual comic - it was in the script outline, like, a panel with a little piece of mail saying she had been approved for disability income or something of the sort - it just got scrapped further into the project (though it's like, still implied somewhat). if u wanna read into it, u could say that's what the comic is really about - an invisibly disabled character being saved from having to work a job that's killing her. it just so happens that the way in which it's done is also really hot.

anyway, moving on from the tangent. a lot of work went into these backgrounds, and i'm really proud of them, even if they're barely visible most of the time. here's some highlights!

expressions & body language

i had. so much fun with the facial expressions and body language in this comic! especially rascal's. i really wanted to convey this sort of, very animated otherworldly demon who's always moving and gesturing in some way, and i had so much fun with it. it was also great practice for expressive poses, which have since become something i really enjoy drawing. rascal's hands in particular are something i spent a lot of time getting right. something about its hands being so expressive felt so appealing to me, like, i feel like it really helped convey this creature's unrestrained confidence and whimsy.

i think this one panel of pebble is my favourite example of it in the comic. notice how she's rubbing her footpaws together shyly as she's given the news of her predicament's permanence. her tail swinging from side to side as a nervous stim, her eyes focused on the floor as she's zoning out, thinking about how this is how it's going to be for the rest of her life. her hair's all unkempt, showing that it's not long after her changes and she's been too anxious to bother brushing her hair, or that she hasn't figured out how to do it with her new hooves yet. her ears all droopy, further driving in the anxiety of the moment. the mask on her face, while appropriate for a doctor's office, also helps show that she doesn't want others to see her weird mouthless snout.

i feel like most of these details don't get noticed by the readers consciously, but on a subconscious level they help a lot with creating the exact mood and feeling i want the reader to get from the scene.

composition & comic devices

there's a lot of little comic storytelling tricks i used throughout afterhour adjustments! i studied these and how they're used in other comics hoping to like, use them to improve the flow of the comic overall; i think i did good :3 here's a list of some of my favourites:

• the narration at the start of the comic is written in past tense, it's meant to tie into the narration at the end, implying that the reader is experiencing the comic through pebble's retelling of the events
• pebble is always contained within the bounds of the panels, while parts of rascal are almost always out of bounds, further driving in that the rules of this reality don't apply to it
• the panels where the sequence of events that changes pebble forever starts and ends are drawn bleeding into the borders of the page and behind other panels, helping highlight their importance
• the panel / speech bubble where rascal interrupts pebble is drawn overlapping the previous panel, helping convey that pebble was stopped mid-sentence
• every instance of rascal using "you" to refer to pebble is written in the same font as pebble's speech

easter eggs & references

i left a few easter eggs in the comic! did you find any of them?

• more of an inspiration than an easter egg, but the city view panel on the first page is visually based on an area in oneshot
• page 2 has some recognisable graffiti, namely the cool S and the karma 2 symbol from rain world (usually seen on pebble's collar)
• on the last panel of page 3, there's a yinglet viewing the Events through the door window (somewhat hard to see because of the streetlight)
• on the first panel of page 6, the creature from adventures with anxiety can be seen through the door
• page 7 panel 2 has a slugcat, then panel 4 has a lambda symbol graffiti
• on the last panel of page 8, pebble's using a logitech pebble mouse. also on this panel are the nuphy halo65 keyboard and the ikea markus chair - these are not meant as easter eggs, they're just what i happen to use :v
• page 9 panel 3 has three references; the cafe behind the characters is named "critter café" in reference to critter.cafe, a mastodon instance i co-run; the two characters in front of it are auri and sylvie, both my < CHARACTER / SELF / OTHER > that i've drawn in the past
• the second-to-last panel on page 9 feature a yingmote mug by myno (which you can buy here), featured bc it's my favourite mug :3
• (also uh, someone asked me later why pebble would be holding a mug at that point, since she can't drink anything anymore, which i found hilarious because that's such an obvious oversight that neither me nor any of my proofreaders noticed)

the comic is. rly hot

ok i know i know i can keep talking about the Artistic Intent and stuff all day long, but it wouldn't be fair to not bring up how hot this whole thing is to me. i set out to make a comic with the goal of making it as hot and gender to me as possible and like YEA i definitely accomplished that here. i mean. after the comic i started like exclusively drawing my fursona as the post-comic version. so.

having the power to draw your own hyper specific kinda-porn-i-guess-but-also-not-really is genuinely the best...

last bit..

i couldn't really find a place to fit this into the post but i'm like. so proud of this POV shot here. it was NOT EASY to get right but i feel like i pulled it off rly well and it adds so much to the comic. the way u can see pebble's bulky ass blank snout off to the side like she would in her vision, how it's all fluffy because it's so close up, the way she's looking down at her brand new hooves, moving them around to examine them, her mind refusing to believe that this is real because of the implications of it but her eyes telling a different story.... hhhh i cooked with this one

also rly proud of this bit where she's looking at herself in the mirror and u can actually see the hoof in her field of vision on the left side of the panel

ok that's about it. i'm sorry that this post is kinda all over the place, i honestly wasn't even sure if i wanted to publish it.. lately i find it difficult to convince myself that anyone has much interest in hearing what i have to say

thanks for reading <3

more reading

next post:
sunfluffs - the game that gets it
3 May 2026

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