8: in which Ollie is so excited to answer Sania’s questions that the world stops being grayscale

january 11th, 2026

transcript

unlike the previous pages, this page is drawn digitally and fully colored. Ollie is bright green, with white markings and a darker green nose and antennae; Pepper is light brown with white markings and a darker brown nose; Sania the tiger-striped child has black hair and brownish-orange skin? fur?? with black stripes; and Kristie the long-snooted child has light skin and light brown hair.

Sania, pointing to Pepper: can we pet her?
Ollie: yeah! she really likes being pet. we do need to leave in a sec though

Sania: can we pet you?
Ollie, looking mildly uncomfortable: uh, no thanks. even really fluffy humans like me usually don’t like being pet. it can feel kinda rude
Kristie pauses from petting Pepper to say “oh. sorry”
Ollie: thanks!

Sania, tilting her head curiously: how come you look like a dog?
Ollie, perking up and smiling widely: ooh! so I’m what’s called “multi,” which means–

Ollie is cut off by a voice off-panel calling “SANIA! KRISTIE! get back over here! oh my god Sania, you can’t just ask someone why they look like a dog”
Sania, flattening her ears in frustration, calls back, “but Mommmmm!”

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it’s digital color comics time! I’m sorry this one took so long; it was more due to a lack of comic-making routine on my part than how long this page actually took to make. it feels sooooo fun and easy to be working digitally again, and while I think starting on paper was a good way to break through my initial inertia, I’m guessing I’ll stick with digital for a while going forwards! I’ve missed it 😀

the color palettes of all these characters are subject to change; I’ll probably be playing around with them for a while! Ollie only has two coat colors to Holly’s original three, mostly ‘cuz I didn’t want to bother with doing a third color all the time. I’ve also switched the linework, eyes, etc from AwS: Vanilla’s purple to a more mainstream black — I think the purple was a fun original choice, but that the the black will likely “go better” with various other colors (and now it’ll be less ambiguous what’s purple in-world and what’s black in-world! . . . which does mean I need to finally decide what colors Lily’s nose and things are; even I don’t know). I’m very excited to have realized that I can make Ollie’s antennae a different color than the linework, since they used to be constantly sticking up in the speech bubble area in a way that made them blend in with the speech balloon tags, to the potential confusion of readers trying to figure out who’s saying what.

Sania and Kristie were originally totally improvised as a basically day-of addition to this scene, but now I’m growing fond of writing for them, and am thinking of bringing one or both of them back in the distant future as recurring characters. keep an eye out for ’em in the meantime :3

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