Uncategorized Archives - Page 19 of 39

April 11, 2014April 4, 2014

The Story Behind Johnson & Sir

I love making Johnson & Sir.

And not just for the T-Rex Sissy Fights.

Or the Noodle Trees.

Or Sir’s Sirness.

Sir_What_Sorcery_Is_This — I REALLY want this to be a thing on Tumblr.

I love Johnson & Sir largely because of something that most readers don’t know about until today: the story behind why it exists.

Originally, Johnson & Sir started with my little sister and me hanging out and playing Jak II.

There are bad guys in that game called Krimzon Guards (which are pretty much elf police because everyone in that game was an elf or a talking beast). The fun part is, when you’re making Jak stand idle in the street or you’re just being bored, you can overhear the Krimzon Guards talking to each other and being bored.

My sister and I started to have fun with it and we spit-balled our own made-up dialogue between two Krimzon Guards, whom we called Johnson and Sir. And it was Johnson’s job to make Sir’s life as miserable and odd as possible. At that time, any time I drew them, it was a running gag that you would never see Johnson’s face (kind of like Wilson’s hidden face in the show Home Improvement).

Also Johnson cross-dressed. A LOT. And hit on Sir any chance he could.

For a few years, it stayed as an inside joke between my sister and me until I went to college. It was there that I shared the idea with my roommate, and then we went nuts with it and developed Johnson and Sir even more. There were insinuations of scandalous affairs, dry humor, the works.

Over time, my roommate moved out, college happened, and for a while I forgot about Johnson and Sir.

UNTIL ONE DAY…

It was in March of 2013. My older sister was in town for a few months until she could move to Arizona (long story). And by that time, I was dating Marc the Boyfriend for a bit. All three of us decided to go out to lunch together and just hang out.

While there, not only did I make Marc the Boyfriend giggle at the banter between my sister and me, but we both ended up talking about Johnson and Sir with him.

It happened a little like this:

Me: I’ve been thinking about getting into webcomics, but I don’t know what to make.

Sister: Dude, you should make a comic about Johnson and Sir. That shit cracked me up.

Marc: What’s that?

So afterward I sketched a few character designs, got a few ideas for strips from my sisters, and then Johnson & Sir was born.

JohnsonandSirPromo4 — Some new characters were added over time, too.

Although Johnson & Sir has gone through a lot of changes in art, the humor is always there, and I hope it stays that way.

If you would like to read it (and you should, because it’s ridiculous and fun), you can start reading it here.

And then you will be part of a wonderful, fantastic inside joke.

April 10, 2014April 4, 2014

Abandoned Projects: Drawn Silly

Oh boy this is an OLD one.

Today’s project feature is my (very) old journal webcomic, Drawn Silly.

Way back in 2010 (oh god that was four years ago as of today)…

As I was hanging out with the college Cartooning Club and talking about webcomics and the possibilities within them, I started to wonder how I could get into this webcomic thing.

At the time, journal webcomics were either emerging or had been around for a short time, and I went, “Oh I could do that!” So I did.

I liked this project so much at one point that I made prints of one of my favorite pages:

Click the image to get to the page where you can get a print of your own. (YAY subversive advertising)

The problem? I never updated it consistently.

It also got to a point where I wasn’t excited to work on it, and I felt like I had nothing new to share. That, and college got more intense and there was some personal drama going on with one of my ex’s.

So I stopped the project the semester after I started it.

HOWEVER…

Within the last few months, I’ve been considering getting back into journal comics, but making the art WAY simpler (i.e. no markers or colors, so I can more easily update daily).

Though I won’t lie, I’ve been considering starting it again, largely because my older sister is encouraging me to do it if only so she can co-star in it. For a while the project was called Adventures with a Bipolar Sister.

Over time, her diagnosis changed from being Manic Depressive to having Borderline Personality, so that title fell by the wayside.

If I DO move forward with the idea, we both decided it should be called Adventures in Adulthood, because adulthood is FRACKING WEIRD and I want to have as much fun with it as possible.

I still really want to make it. Would you read it?

April 9, 2014April 4, 2014

Abandoned Projects: Nautilus & Riley

This project will be on the shelf for a short time because I still want to make this.

The project highlight today is called Nautilus & Riley.

In the not-too-distant future, a scientist builds a combat-model android, codenamed Nautilus. The scientist’s daughter, Riley, has watched the development of Nautilus throughout her life and slowly develops a crush on him (mostly because her father doesn’t let her go outside the house all that much). By the time he’s done, she’s 18 years old and incredibly desperate for a companion, so she steals Nautilus out of her father’s hands as often as she can.

(I’m going to spoil the story for you because the story is incredibly short.)

As Nautilus and Riley spend time together, her feelings intensify, though Nautilus (being an android) is pretty sure he cannot feel love, even though he cares about her.

However, they both are in the scientist’s lab one day when the scientist is not there. Riley starts digging through the files on Nautilus out of curiosity. So she’s digging through them when she discovers that Nautilus was, in fact, human once, until the scientist got him and made him into an android. The reason Nautilus doesn’t remember any of this is because his mind was completely reset.

Even worse, the scientist plans on using the notes he made while constructing Nautilus on a new project – turning Riley into a cyborg.

The scientist barges in and sees what Riley is doing. He (of course) gets furious and goes to kill her. Nautilus gets in the way and the scientist and he end up killing each other.

And Riley gets to live.

…

The biggest question with this project is “How do I make this story?”

Will it be a wordless comic? Or a picture book-like story? Or what?

I feel pretty comfortable with the story itself (though when I look at it I want to tweak a few things), but I still don’t know how to tell it.

Until I figure it out, this project will be on the shelf.

But what do you think? Do you like the story or not?

April 8, 2014April 4, 2014

Abandoned Projects: Catalyst

This project has been shelved, retooled, and shelved again, and I don’t know when this will be finished.

In all of its iterations, it’s gone by the project name Catalyst.

In the oldest iteration, the story followed a teenage girl named Kaitlin. She thought she was a human being but it turns out she’s an android developed by a tech company as part of a larger, more sinister plot. So she escaped the company and went out into the world to hide from them.

In the second iteration, she was joined by a larger man named Striker, who had a similar back-story.

I wrote an eight-page mini-comic as a prologue to this, which you can read here.

In the third iteration, the story was retooled completely, became a short story, and got set a couple hundred years into the future. In this story, a society evolved in which androids were all created to be gladiators who fought for human entertainment. Kaitlin is one of these androids.

The reason I changed it was because when I told a few people the first iteration, I got mixed reviews. A friend of mine went, “I LOVE IT,” but my sister was like, “This sounds absolutely stupid and cliche. Did you rip off an anime for this?”

So I shelved it, until within the last few months there was a call for short-story submissions for a comics anthology.

I tried REALLY hard to rewrite this into a short story, but no matter how many times I wrote the thing, I felt like it wasn’t working. I still can’t really place why.

In the end, I shelved Catalyst again and just made a new comic for the anthology. It worked out in the end. (Well, not for Catalyst, it didn’t.)

I think Catalyst is just going to stay on the shelf until I decide what to do with it (or anybody out there wants to help me edit it into submission).

April 7, 2014April 3, 2014

Abandoned Projects: Greta’s Story

This is a big one for me. It’s a bigger thorn in my side than even The Legend of Jamie Roberts.

This comic I’ve shelved has the working title of Greta’s Story, or Imaginary.

Greta is a 13-year-old girl who’s forced by her mom to go to summer camp. She absolutely hates it there, but at least her hatred is shared with another girl named Rona. They both start to run off and avoid the counselors and fellow campers every chance they get.

Well one day Greta spots a shadow with eyes. As it deliberately runs away from her, she chases after it until eventually, it leads her to a portal into another dimension. She tries to avoid it but she falls in accidentally.

Through the portal she is led to a series of doors set in tree trunks, and each door leads to another world with even more tree doors. In a series of events she encounters a river of blood, zombies, mermaids, and a cat-like serpent creature she calls a Wachumacallit who follows her around and can change size every time it hiccups.

Eventually she encounters a group of fighters who are part of a resistance movement against the Queen of Crows.

The Queen of Crows is a tyrant who got her throne by murdering 5 of the 7 Royal Families. Of the two who survived, one family escaped into Greta’s world, and the other stayed behind to fight.

Will Greta ever be able to make it back home? Does she WANT to?

Ok, so there are a few reasons this project got shelved.

1. The project got TOO DAMN BIG. The place that Greta falls into is Imagination itself, which encompassed anything and everything imagined by humanity. At one point in the story Greta literally falls into hell. There were so many characters and so many worlds that it was hard to tell where to draw the line between “This is for Greta’s story” and “This is an idea I want to make into its own story.”

2. The story got too complicated. I’ll spare you the details, but there were realizations of one’s destiny for at least three cast members, not counting all the history that lead up to the Queen’s taking of the throne.

(I actually made a mini-comic all about how the Queen of Crows started the path of evil. You can read that here, though admittedly there’s not a lot of evil in it until the end.)

Plus the shadows had powers of their own or were tied to royal bloodlines or ate people. It got weird and inconsistent.

3. Greta. There were several points in the scripting of the story that I HATED her. That’s not a good sign to me. When I’m writing I HAVE to be invested in the main character in some way, but every time I thought about writing her I went, “Oh Christ on a Cracker she’s going to be obnoxious and not in a charming way.”

This project will be on the shelf for a while. There’s even a strong possibility that it will never be made (which is a shame, because there were some concepts in there that I liked).

We’ll see…