Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Promise.

Um, yes, so, illness hath struck again.

I drew the first three panels of this strip without pencils, in order to make it look like I was really strongly affected by this terrible disease. (The last panel sort of puts the lie to that, but still.) I'm actually surprised by how well it came out drawing directly in ink - I had to consciously force myself to distort the linework, so it didn't look too good. Look at Ruby's head in panel 3, for example. That's not bad at all.

Maybe I'll just give up on the pencils stage, at least when I'm not drawing anything particularly challenging. It'll certainly save time.