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It's Lori!

From a technical standpoint, this strip isn't as good as later strips. About this time, I was drawing the strip with a 2H pencil and inking directly onto the pencils, scanning the strip into Photoshop, then tweaking layers to allow for characters to interact with foreground and background elements.

Now, take a look at Lori in the third panel. The lines that create her face and hairline are weak. What I was doing at this stage was putting the Lori image atop the background, then using Photoshop's magic wand tool to remove all the white from the square the Lori drawing is in. Because the lines to define her face aren't closed (you can see the jawline ends below her eye and doesn't intersect the neckline), the magic wand would select the white area inside her face. I would delete this white area to get rid of the block of white around the character. What this does is remove some of the greys in the black lines -- the black lines become thinner.

I then added a third layer between Lori and the background, to fill with white where her face and torso should be. This keeps the menuboard and the brickwork from showing up in Lori's face. The whole thing is flattened, saved, and uploaded.

Contrast this with a more recent comic strip or even the first panel where Lori was drawn on the same layer as the menuboard (the other two panels have the menuboard manipulated in Photoshop). Instead of deleting the white in the Lori layer, I discovered that I could change the properties of the Lori layer from "Normal" to "Multiply". This effectively deleted all the pure whites in the Lori layer but didn't shrink or thin out the blacks. It required a bit more work with the white layer, but the result is much, much better.

From a non-technical standpoint, this strip really works well.

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