Birthday Suits - Lost pages
Regular readers from the last year or so would know that the story had a "stop/reverse/new-direction" moment about half way thru - meaning that, having already completed and published three pages I had a rethink of the story, took the pages down and then rewrote/redrew them. The pages as they originally existed weren't working for me - I had thought I wanted to take the story in a particular direction but once I had embarked down that path I realised that direction would create needless complications. Something felt wrong and when something feels wrong with a story then I very quickly become unhappy working on it - so rather than paint myself into a corner I decided to remove and republish.

I didn't want to make the pages available again until I had finished the story. Here they are with some commentary...

The first two pages were replaced with a single page - #70.

I started going down this path, Loxie having some doubts about Willow's innocent relationship with Zoot, because I felt that Loxie had brushed off the whole "just what were they doing together alone" scenario a little two easily. It seemed to me the "there's nothing going on" front she presented to Lorraine in the first instance was more about saving face until she could find the appropriate moment to have a word with both Willow and Zoot. But y'know, it just felt wrong from the get go and really took the mood of the story in a direction that was going to take a lot of resolving to set everything right again... and really, the story wasn't about that at all!

And here we see Willow's reaction where she is forced to re-evaluate her interactions with Zoot. I think it often happens with male-feamale platonic friendships where all it takes is for some third person to put a totally misconstrued interpretation (usually a sexual one) on things to have the wheels fall off. But again, the story wasn't at all about that and would have complicated an already complex plot. Also, there was something too physically vulnerable about Willow's reaction, my preference is to avoid those kind of moments as they go against the tone of the series.

Just a note about the art on the replacement page - some of it is obviously new but some of it borrows from the pages it replaced.

The next page was replaced with page #71.

This seemingly innocent discussion between Zinni and Sally garned a lot of attention from religious based nudist forums, and a lot of discussion from readers. Whilst this was something I had intended on writing into the story almost from the very start - once I had set upon it I realised that the whole subject of nudity and religion was so big that it threatened to totally overwhelm the rest of the story. Also it seemed rather late in proceedings to suddenly introduce such a large theme with little to no set-up. Besides, knowing what path Sally would be taking further into the story - that of planning revenge against her brother with a dirty nappy/diaper and telling a bald faced lie to her mother about why everyone in the family was nude - it just didn't jibe with any sense of her considering herself to be an upstanding, outstanding Christian. Art wise I didn't redraw a thing, I just rewrote the script. The whole religion and nudity debate will probably get it's very own story where there is no distractions from other plot elements!