Archer’s brother and his family are coming for a short visit. Archer’s hippie, vegetarian brother. Oh, yes. Read it here on Tapastic.

Trivia: This is one of the very earliest PiQue strips I ever drew, originally created in 2000 with monochromatic black & white art suitable for newspaper printing. The idea was that I was going to sell the strip to queer newspapers (ha ha). Well, a couple of things happened:

1. Pretty much all queer newspapers in the U.S. had space for one or two comics, and that was it. I got a lot of very nice rejection letters.

2. It was around this time that huge numbers of queer newspapers stopped publishing altogether.

3. The cross-hatched inking style was murder on my hand, causing me crippling pain. I had to develop a new style or perish.

Once again, this is an experiment with digital coloring. I can’t say I’m thrilled by it – a lot of the textures dropped out when I reduced the file size for web. But the act of coloring their house helped me realize some interesting details about Todd & Archer’s styles – Archer would prefer to live in a featureless white box. Todd wants a different color on every wall. Todd wins this one because he works from home all day and is the one who actually has to spend time there. He invited Archer to repaint to his own tastes, knowing full well that Archer would never paint it himself and is too cheap to hire anyone to do it. And I didn’t know these things about them until I colored this strip! How about that.