About this Strip

So here's an interesting one. Number wise, CVRPG 2499 is the second longest continuous arc of the whole series, clocking in just 31 comics shorter than CVRPG IV. as such, I could have done just as long a comic for this one as for CVRPG IV. Thing is, though, a lot of what happens here is just fun, random adventures that don't really affect the plot. They're great in the moment but, when you look at them in the cold light of "what's really essential", there was a lot I could just get rid of.

The whole exploration of Jemma Base on Ceres, where the crew finds the weird, gelatinous tentacle creatures is one. That's a fun adventure, but nothing really happens there that carried forward other than that the crew blew up the whole dwarf planet. So we feature that and excise everything else, condensing 120 comics (give or take) into three panels. Similarly, the adventure on Horus, where the guys go off and battle the Fairy King (after a ton of randomly wandering around). Again, there are great moments in there, but the King is never mentioned again, nor do we ever go back to Horus. Once CVRPG 2499 is over, that adventure was meaningless. So we take another 100-plus comics and condense it down into four panels. That trimmed a lot.

Now, one reason why these arcs were so long was because I got way wordier as the comic moved forward. But 2499 was also an experiment in doing more "comic style" layouts. It had fixed comics with pages in bundles such that, if you wanted, you could quite literally print out each and every chapter as a full comic. Thus, I had to make sure that adventures fit into a specific number of pages, and if they didn't, then that arc got a second chapter and had to take longer. Give and take.

Meanwhile, some other parts of this arc were moved around for the sake of faster storytelling. We don't explore Sprocket's ship, the Sylph, before it gets blown up, so instead Golem meets Gertie later. The guys have their battle with the fairies before Sprockets joins with Gertie, so that whole arc (which overlapped the whole plot line with the Stalkers) now comes first and Darkmoon, Angel, and Golem get to show up in the back half of the series (instead of floating in space for something like four issues). Everything got nice and condensed.

Now, onto some fun notes. One: sprites. I made the decision that I wanted all these Essential comics to be done in the same style, so while it would have been easier to just reuse my vector art for these later comics, instead I got to make all new sprites for my future-set characters. I also drew up vehicles, and the whole interior of the new Siren Mark II. There's a bunch more stuff that gets to be added to the sprite archive eventually.

Meanwhile, some stuff I didn't draw and used other stuff for the sake of being funny. The most obvious is that instead of drawing up a bunch of Stalker ships I used the aliens from Galaga 3 (and one giant ship from Gradius III). Trust that I will do this again in future strips because, well, it made me laugh.