Transcript: Chapter 2, Episode 24
Blaze and his fellow passengers disembark from the bus, whose next destination is the corner of Reap and Sow. As the living passengers make their way across the pavement, Alastor leans out from the bus exit, ready to jump out.
Blaze walks down the sidewalk of a residential street lined with two-flats as Alastor trails behind him.
Blaze stops short as a large flowerpot falls from a nearby windowsill to the ground inches in front of him with a loud CRASH. Alastor stops behind him.
With a scowl, Blaze turns and looks over his shoulder.
Alastor shrugs apathetically, wearing a sly smirk.
Blaze reaches the edge of the sidewalk and stands at the curb, waiting to step into the crosswalk. Behind him, Alastor raises his hands.
As Blaze stands waiting, a pair of clawed, demonic hands reach around his neck from behind.
Blaze glances over his shoulder with a disgruntled frown. Alastor, back in his regular ghostly form, innocently holds up his gloved hands.
The “walk” sign lights up, and Blaze makes his way across the street with Alastor hovering behind him.
Several newspaper pages fly across the road, and one of them wraps around Blaze’s face. Behind him, Alastor says, “That one wasn’t me.”
Blaze grabs the newspaper that’s clinging to his face.
Blaze tosses the sheet aside.
A paper coffee cup blows into his face, hitting his forehead with a “plink.” Behind him, Alastor says, “That was me.”
At the other side of the road, Alastor leans in over Blaze’s shoulder with a mischievous grin and asks, “Scared yet?”
Blaze looks over his shoulder with a challenging smile. He says, “Scared? Pah! Come on, Alastor, you’re just being mildly annoying.”
Blaze continues, “I work with ghosts every day. If you want to scare me into helping you, you need to come a lot harder than that.” Behind him, Alastor listens silently with a mysterious smirk on his face.
A logo appears: Into the Smoke. Intothesmokecomic.com
An image shows nine ghost hands converging to pet Otto, a content fat black cat. Each hand has several names written on it. Text reads: Special Thanks to my Patrons. Pledge on Patreon at patreon.com/bob_artist. The words “Pledge on Patreon” are crossed out and replaced with the words, “Pet Otto.” An additional URL reads intothesmokecomic.com.
Challenge accepted?
The Patron Credits sheet (a.k.a. the “Pet Otto” sheet) updates with the next episode, so if you haven’t added your name, now’s the time! The next episode will probably go up in 3-4 weeks, but I recommend just adding your name now since I don’t know the exact date. You can add your name here!
In case you missed it in the newsletter/Patreon/tumblr etc., I put out a new ITS personality quiz! 5 of the 6 results have brand new character art, so feel free to take it multiple times to try to get the different characters if you want. (If you don’t want, you can see all the character art here on Patreon.)
Also, if you take the quiz, you can find out which character has come up in like 50% of the results.
I’m planning to put up some process videos from this episode on Patreon in the next day or two, but I only started recording after the backgrounds were done and I was shading the characters. (My method for coloring ITS characters is very different from most of my other work.) But since the videos don’t include any of the backgrounds, other than the walk signal that I forgot to color earlier, I decided to put together a separate process gif of one of the environment-heavy panels. So that’s the new voting incentive. Vote for ITS on Top Webcomics and see the process gif here!
