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WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 7: “Mourning”
This strip was an important one for me in the development of WORLD OF HURT. My first inclination was to continue with more action, but I felt it was important to humanize Alicia Patterson, and tell a little something about her background. My fiancee commented that it was this episode that really caused her to to start caring about the story on its own right, not just because it was something I had written.
I am proud of how Alicia’s mother came across. She has a voice that feels genuine to me, because it is a voice I heard often in my youth in southwest Georgia. However, to maintain the fidelity to the era, this was one of the few times I altered dialogue in a strip after it was posted. In the first panel, Mrs. Patterson originally made a statement about “smart, Black girls,” but I later decided that a middle-aged Black woman from the South in the 1970s may not have been completely used to the term “Black,” so I changed it to “colored.”
Detective Andy Haworth, physically and in temperament, is based on WORLD OF HURT’s resident tech guru of the same name. Andy was instrumental in getting my site going. He did it out of love for the genre, and didn’t ask for compensation. However, in his honor, I said I would include Andy as a character in WORLD OF HURT. Appropriately, he’s about the only person that Pastor can trust.
I hope to see you again on Thursday, but remember that new episodes of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomic are posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.
- JEP
