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Entry tags:
comic strips
Although I am best known for creating comic books, and my love affair with them goes back decades, comic strips [the ones that appeared daily in newspapers] have also been important to me just as long. Before I started buying comic books with any regularity, I was reading the funnies every day. And it was while I was reading a comic strip that I had my epiphany and realized that I wanted to be a cartoonist.
I tried a number of times over the years to create my own comic strip, giving up for long stretches in between. In the mid-70s, when I hit university, I tried to develop a strip about me and my friends, with some obligatory wackiness thrown in because we weren't quite wacky enough on our own.
In the mid-80s, I worked on two different ideas for a panel [this was in the heyday of The Far Side, remember]: both of those attempts featured dadaist anthropomorphic animals.
In the late 90s, I tried to put together a strip about a philosophically inclined talking dog, and another, very brief, false start about a frog lounge singer.
After the turn of the century, I was working on two more strip ideas. One was about an alien who, after years of working on Earth performing abductions and such, decided to "go native" and retire to suburbia with his wife and son. The other was a lower-key affair, involving an odd-couple husband and wife and their two kids.
Any of them could have worked; none of them did.
And my fatal problem was always the same -- I didn't have enough ideas. At that time, the Holy Grail of comic strips was to be syndicated in the newspapers, as had been true for over a hundred years. Which meant you needed to be able to think up a new idea for a new strip, day in and day out without fail, zero wiggle room, over the course of many years. You needed to be able to prove to the syndicates that you wouldn't run out of ideas, because they were hoping to run your strip for decades.
The closest I ever came was with the alien strip. I wrote about two hundred ideas for that one before I ran dry. But that wouldn't even last me a year in the papers. I simply did not have what it takes.
This year I find myself making a comic strip, although on New Year's Day I had not the slightest inkling that this might happen.
Things have changed since my aliens twenty years ago. It's not just that comic strips have established themselves as part of the webcomics scene online -- it's also that the production of a strip has become more casual. In recent years I have seen a number of web strips appear that don't have their own dedicated website or a strict daily schedule. [Pirate Mike and Big Fat Charlie are a couple of my faves at this writing.] These strips show up on social media, and seem to appear at random, whenever the artist has finished the next one. And people accept them. This might not be a great way to build a devoted, avid audience clamoring for the next installment, but it's a good way to have some fun in the strip medium.
And so, when a character appeared in my doodles who looked to me like he had strip potential, he appeared at a time when I felt freed from the necessity of meeting a daily deadline, from the contractual obligation of producing more ideas for years on end. The time had come when I could create a strip just for fun.
And so I started working on Not That Magic: Tales of Vernor Magus. And it is fun. So far, I have been working on it fast enough that I am able to release a new strip every week. But if a week comes and there isn't a new one ready, so be it. I love being able to relax with a comic and not needing to perform under pressure. This is supposed to be my retirement, after all, eh?
I tried a number of times over the years to create my own comic strip, giving up for long stretches in between. In the mid-70s, when I hit university, I tried to develop a strip about me and my friends, with some obligatory wackiness thrown in because we weren't quite wacky enough on our own.
In the mid-80s, I worked on two different ideas for a panel [this was in the heyday of The Far Side, remember]: both of those attempts featured dadaist anthropomorphic animals.
In the late 90s, I tried to put together a strip about a philosophically inclined talking dog, and another, very brief, false start about a frog lounge singer.
After the turn of the century, I was working on two more strip ideas. One was about an alien who, after years of working on Earth performing abductions and such, decided to "go native" and retire to suburbia with his wife and son. The other was a lower-key affair, involving an odd-couple husband and wife and their two kids.
Any of them could have worked; none of them did.
And my fatal problem was always the same -- I didn't have enough ideas. At that time, the Holy Grail of comic strips was to be syndicated in the newspapers, as had been true for over a hundred years. Which meant you needed to be able to think up a new idea for a new strip, day in and day out without fail, zero wiggle room, over the course of many years. You needed to be able to prove to the syndicates that you wouldn't run out of ideas, because they were hoping to run your strip for decades.
The closest I ever came was with the alien strip. I wrote about two hundred ideas for that one before I ran dry. But that wouldn't even last me a year in the papers. I simply did not have what it takes.
This year I find myself making a comic strip, although on New Year's Day I had not the slightest inkling that this might happen.
Things have changed since my aliens twenty years ago. It's not just that comic strips have established themselves as part of the webcomics scene online -- it's also that the production of a strip has become more casual. In recent years I have seen a number of web strips appear that don't have their own dedicated website or a strict daily schedule. [Pirate Mike and Big Fat Charlie are a couple of my faves at this writing.] These strips show up on social media, and seem to appear at random, whenever the artist has finished the next one. And people accept them. This might not be a great way to build a devoted, avid audience clamoring for the next installment, but it's a good way to have some fun in the strip medium.
And so, when a character appeared in my doodles who looked to me like he had strip potential, he appeared at a time when I felt freed from the necessity of meeting a daily deadline, from the contractual obligation of producing more ideas for years on end. The time had come when I could create a strip just for fun.
And so I started working on Not That Magic: Tales of Vernor Magus. And it is fun. So far, I have been working on it fast enough that I am able to release a new strip every week. But if a week comes and there isn't a new one ready, so be it. I love being able to relax with a comic and not needing to perform under pressure. This is supposed to be my retirement, after all, eh?