YHMH#1 (2017 — 115th Congress)

One from the archives! The very first Your House, My House strip!

I've been super busy with school lately, and I'm not always able to keep up with YHMH as often as I'd like to. So, I thought I'd try uploading some oldies, which you'll be able to find under the Your House, My House Archive on the categories tab. I don't have decent scans of all of them — some are just taken with an iPhone camera or scanner when I didn't have access to a nice scanner, such as when I was traveling. And of course, there will be some that were scanned with a scanner that I didn't like the look of.

When I started Your House, My House, my mom had a really nice Epson printer/scanner that she used for work. Eventually, sometime in the middle of 2018 or '19, I think, that scanner bit the bullet and was replaced by an HP. Now, this HP printer/scanner was highly functional as a printer, but its scanning capabilities were tuned more for documents than they were for images or drawings, so the color quality was very poor and the characters would always look extremely washed out, as opposed to what you see here, which is incredibly vibrant and colorful. I would have to add more saturation in post, but that couldn't fix what wasn't there: many of the lighter, paler colors just plain wouldn't get picked up in the original scan (light grays and blues, and especially the Dick Blick light peach that you see in the image above). These lighter colors start to look faded anyway as they lose their ink — much quicker than the darker and brighter colors like black, brick red, and cerulean blue.

Later, I got the scanner that I'm using now, which is an Epson Perfection V39. This is way more vibrant, especially on the "magazine" setting, and also has the advantage of being portable. It's barely bigger than a laptop, and I can fit it in my backpack. At the point that I got this scanner, you will notice a difference in the image quality of YHMH strips, which will be around the time of the early primary season in the 2020 election series.

It's also interesting to look back on these and see how much the strip has changed, evolved, and improved. I sometimes cringe at this one in particular, because the last panel is way too crowded, and it's almost impossible to read the text. Part of me has considered redrawing just that last panel as possibly a stand-alone. It's not that high on my list of priorities, but maybe if I ever get to the point of publishing a Your House, My House book, I'll go for it.