An Unrehearsed Riot

If you saw my most recent comic, you may be wondering what’s going on.  All of my comics to date have fit the newspaper-comic format:  three or more panels, buildup, punchline, haha.  I’m tired of it.

This past summer I spent almost no time actually working on my comic, but I did spend a lot of time reading over my old strips.  The thing the struck me about them was that they didn’t really strike me.  They felt like generic knockoffs of popular webcomics like xkcd, Pictures for Sad Children, etc.  I realized that my comic needed something a little more tangible – something that grabbed at the reader a little more.  In the sea of webcomics, a three panel strip, especially if it’s about stick-figures, isn’t going anywhere.

I wanted to make my comic more memorable.  At first I toyed with the idea of making recurring characters with names.  Though characters do make it very easy to grab onto a comic and get into a swing of reading it, my comic is deliberately minimalist.  Creating characters complicates.  Besides, how am I to distinguish between characters who are drawn exactly alike?

In the end, I decided to abandon the idea of a comic altogether.  ”Comic” was a word that I forced onto my drawings when i wanted to find a niche in the internet.  They were never meant to be that way.

So what does this mean for the future?  Well, superficially it means you can expect to see more drawings and fewer typical comics.  On a deeper level, it means that I’m trying to bring the soul back into my drawings.  I want my stick figures to be “characters” not simply because they have names, but rather because they capture a more transcendent individuality.  Simple images which captivate and beg the reader to contemplate them are more my style anyway.  Let me know what you think.