052 “And Now One In Color”

Wow, the last commentary of Volume One. For those who’ve been reading my little rants from the beginning, you’ve made it.

At one time the strip was a weekly strip. I tried my best to adhere to a schedule, but sometimes I couldn’t. Whether it was being too busy, moving from one apartment to another, my tendinitis, computer failure, or just not up to the job, doing four panels a week on this comic was just something I couldn’t do. But every volume is 52 strips, a tradition I’ve continued even though the strip is no longer a weekly.

Inspired by #40, I thought it would be a cool recap to ask the characters in the different threads something, and have them all answer in character. This is kind of a fourth wall breaker, but I don’t think the joke is that they’re breaking the fourth wall, but their answers. More importantly, a recap strip would allow me to create more swearing friend dialogue, something I was always keen on doing.

Lastly, this was a strip I could make in color. This was a big novelty at the time. This was the first strip ever coloured without being just grayscale and I had to come up with colour schemes for everyone. I pretty much kept the color scheme, with the exception of Lovetalk who is sporting a purple sweater instead of a red one. What was I thinking?

I like how everyone responds to the question except the swearing friend, who just doesn’t seem to care. No resolutions from him, he’s just going to tell you to fuck off. That’s real asian porn on the TV. Mark is wearing a “Yahoo! Sucks” t-shirt, probably due to my frustration with them on so many levels… Yahoo! wouldn’t list the site, and Yahoo! bought the server I was on, imposing a restriction on bandwidth and forcing many of us to change servers. Ishida is sporting a green scarf due to an “accident” in an earlier strip. I don’t know why I put the love doll in the final shot, I can’t recall if I had ever planned to use her again. I don’t think so, but I don’t know why I put her in.

Speaking of the final shot, that’s one of the incredibly few times you’ll see many of characters in the same frame. I try to keep the threads as separate as possible, but this panel was an exception.

In the end…

Volume One is something I am proud of. It survived the move to Japan, and I can see improvement in my storytelling ability. I broke many of my own personal barriers and I was able to put out a fairly entertaining strip. I worked with a lot of different artists in different places which was a thrill. Volume two and onwards were very much solitary affairs (only five jam strips in Volume 2 and none afterwards) and I miss working with different people. However, I am returning to Canada for a couple of weeks and hopefully we’ll see the return of the jam strip there.

Thanks for reading a volume’s worth of commentary! See you in Volume Two!