Bar'd (Again)

A-hey-hey! So some of you may know that historically, I've worked on a comic by the name of Bar'd. I posted bits and pieces of it a while back, buuut... I was quite a way in at that point, and it made it hard for newer readers to follow.
Recently however, unfortunately the website it was being hosted at... well, it turned pretty bad. So bad it's not really worth hosting there anymore. Which is bad for me but... well, good for anyone who's wanting to try and follow this series from it's start!
As of today, I'm starting to repost Bar'd from it's start, beginning all the way back at Comic 1. I admit, it didn't start well. But over time... well, I'm pretty happy with some of the places it went.
So! If you're interested in reading, there's no better time to start than now! I present to you, Bar'd - starting once more today all the way back at it's very first page!


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So; A centaurian bouncer, a tomboy sheep, a bearded human, a squishy thing, a transgender ghost, and a dog in severe need of a shirt walk into a bar. The bouncer walks up to the bar, and orders a drink. The manager chides him and the others on being late to work, and then some sort of punchline occurs. I dunno. I'm working on it.

001 - Reminiscing on the paNDA

WELL HERE WE ARE GANG.
It's me, it's yah boi, it's Dregan, reposting Bar'd after the great Smackjeeves pilgrimage. We're starting off over 10 years back with the first issues, adding one a day with NEW, UPDATED COMMENTARY. And over a year from now, when all these pages have been added, what happens then?
Bar'd updates some more. Maybe.

Happy New Year everyone! Let's begin at the beginning.

So this was it, the first ever page of Bar'd. Otherwise known as 'Dregan just worked out how to use filters, and needs to be stopped'. As first pages go, this one is a mess... but I think at least back in the day helped to establish who Vas was as a character, as well as the tone for the comic moving forward?
Apparently it also established my overabundant habit of giving Vas various bloody wounds. 'Time to reminisce on all those times I historically bled a lot'. Also I apparently had yet to add tiny speech tails to my speech bubbles. Admittedly, I always make them so tiny they never help, but it's a matter of presentation you know?
Presentation is unfortunately not this page's strong point.

002 - How To: Destroy Society
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PAGE 2. Still... still real ugly. Vas' sprites alone are enough reason to run away and never look back, but the continued addition of 'filters I don't know how to use' only served to make this page look... real bad. That, and the speech bubbles covering all free panel space.
The sprites and filter usage at the very least got better. The overabundance of speech bubbles... not so much.

It's also worth noting how I basically had no Extras to make use of at this point for background characters - so basically all the sprites use for Extras here were like... old characters of mine I'd abandoned. Panel 5 in particular has like... what was actually the same character 3 times over?
Perhaps Vas was right about true global anarchy. Evidently reality had unhinged right there.

003 - Sheepish Suspicions
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Aaand here we have the first ever page with Shelia! ...Apparently I thought the ultimate way to establish her personality was to have her be vaguely confused and state a degree of underwhelming facts.
But at least we established the bar sells juice.
This was an important fact to establish and will definitely serve an important purpose in the long run future of the comic.

004 - It Wasn't Me, It Was My Biological Make-Up
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So last comic, I started adding tiny tails to my speech bubbles. On this page, one of the commenters asked if I could add tails to my speech bubbles. That shows the level of effectiveness of my original tails.
...
I'll be honest, they never truly got effective at all.

Also here we establish Vas' age as being... needlessly young to be honest. Back then, I was ageing characters in real time, and since I first made Vas as an edgy teen... well, Vas was an edgy teen too. Albeit I think I'd at least toned off some of the edge by this point.
There's also the matter of Vas' fluctuating intelligence. I'm not really sure how much he knows about biology. He did spend some time in society to learn some stuff, so maybe this is fine?
Though establishing the mystery of 'Noone fully knows what's happening in Vas' body' was at least a good thing for me to address early. I'm not sure it plays into things too often later... buuut it's definitely the sort of thing that comes up again. So hey, go me, this page is at least on some scale, not the worst.

005 - How To: Drunken Box
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Now thiiis is an early page I rather regret. Some of you who've historically followed Bar'd, and have seen the later pages, will know this character is Seth. Seth is... a character I really shouldn't've introduced this early on, and especially not in this manner.
Truth is, at this point I lacked a decent pool of characters to draw upon - and thus used one of my own as just a manner of establishing how the comic runs with it's shifting focus on different patrons and such. Seth however has wound up becoming more important to the comic in the long run, and if I'd pre-planned a lot better early on, I feel I could've done a much better job of establishing Seth in a more meaningful manner...

This page also demonstrated me attempting a technique I'd never tried before, attempting to subtle down the shades of characters to make them appear less focused/more in the background. How well it worked on different sprites and characters... varied. I wanted to make the bar seem a lot more occupied, but rather than blending in to the background it instead made a lot more characters just appear kinda distracted instead. This wound up being a practise I chose not to maintain.

Whoops! My laptop's been borked, so not been able to post the pages here that I pre-uploaded elsewhere. As such, MASS UPLOAD.

006 - Simple Showdown
007 - Closing Call
008 - How To: Apologise
009 - Sibling SMASH!
010 - I Can Run My Bar With No Handlebars
011 - How To: Have Nightmares
012 - April Fools 2009
013 - Boot To The-! Wait...
014 - How To: Get Served
015 - If You Can't Break The Rules, Obliterate Them
016 - Easter 2009
017 - How To: Play Baseball
018 - People Problems
019 - His Midi-Clorians Are Off The Scale Too
020 - How To: Analyse The Situation
021 - Like Looking In A Magic Mirror
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OH HEY. Apologies if I've not been responding to comments over the past however many pages. Unfortunately my laptop died, WHOOPS. Managed to get it fixed in time to get posting pages again conveniently. Like, very much just in time. SO NOW A DAY MAY NOT BE MISSED.

Also, I just wanna say, I feel younger me took a real brave stand here. I mean like, racist main character? Daring even. Genre defining. A real example to writers of the future.