Well, this one (Issue 178) was done BEFORE midnight, but I wanted to do a blog so it will be up just a wee bit afterwards. Though, Jim argued it is still Tuesday on the West Coast, so he is putting a Tuesday date on the front page!

Of course, this one has new art. The Cosmic Dungeon scenery are mostly from pre-existing video game backgrounds (though they are moderately to heavily modified by me), but the Inn is all new and original. It took me forever to decide what style I wanted to do the building. We always knew we wanted the big sign on the top, but actually putting it up there, with the neon arrow was a bit tricky. Anyhow, I spent a good deal of a day looking at tons of medieval inn and pub pictures, and finally decided that I wanted to use this one. When I finally showed it to Jim, he thought it was a pretty good pixelation! What do you think?

The Inn would not prove my greatest challenge. Instead it would be the wording on the sign. Reason being is that there are TONS of gothic and medieval fonts available on the Web, but very FEW that are pixel/bitmap. The difference between a bitmap and regular font is that bitmap fonts are created to be legible at very small sizes. Most regular fonts degrade badly and are illegible at small point sizes. Considering the fonts in Bitmap World range from 10 to 6 points, I was having a very difficult time finding a gothic font that would look good. Most needed to be 12 to 14 points, and we didn’t have enough room in the panel–which I learned the hard way after spending the time to do 2 different signs in 2 different fonts, to have both be a bust. Ugh! I probably Googled about 50 different combinations of keywords trying to narrow down a “gothic pixel font” or “medieval bitmap font” or…you get the idea. I was actually getting pretty desperate and considered drawing my own font, but I had already taken so much time with this! What I eventually ended up doing is hitting bitmap fonts sites and just manually going through their whole catalog until I found something.

And I did! Hours and hours later. But, I am very happy to say that the font in the last panel is a pixel font called HeinzHeinrich, and it’s awesome. And I think it looks awesome too. I do love the gag on the sign. I meant is to be more of a play on words, but thinking about it, it really does seem to be a sign of our times as we have more businesses sharing space to save money.

I am very hopeful Friday’s comic will be a tad easier, even though I have to do the inside of the pub.