Two C@P comics in one week! It’s like 2003 all over again. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this. This comic was originally twice as long. Imagine. 8 panels with 6 characters on each one. It’s daunting.

It feels like my eyes are bleeding just from doing all the text on this one. I hope there’s a good flow to it. With so many characters on screen at once and so many different conversational tangents occurring my biggest worry is that some of the comedy in this one gets lost in translation.

 Like I’d mentioned in an earlier blog,I’m currently in the process of going through and attaching blogs to as many of the comics as possible. I’m kinda streching it out over time because of how vast my archives are, it’s a pretty arduous task. I recently found a folder that has all sorts of newsposts from the first time I posted alot of the older comics. It’ll be interesting to compare what I thought then against what I thought now.

I had to take a few passes at this comic to get it right, there were alot of ideas that I had to put on the back burner in order to establish developing plot points and characterization for Phoebe. I also had to talk with Chuck and Ryan both, to a good extent, to get my motivation right and exactly how to frame everything. While this comic isn’t my favorite, I think it’s solid, and it clearly sets up some great payoff a little while down the road.

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This comic was a beast, A BEAST to get done. Six people per panel. Six. Doing something like this is a whole lot of work, not just artistically, but then in organizing where people are going to be in relation to background and speech bubbles and each other, and keeping things easy to follow while making it SEEM chaotic, by having so many characters involved in a scene at once.  Ryan’s speech here is, probably, one of my favorite examples of character humor I’ve done so far. You know where this is going right away, it’s just a matter of who takes the bait.

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Well, the new site is up and running! After six years of doing comics online, it’s about time I went into business for myself.  Now I know I still have some problems with the layout, specifically if you’re using Firefox on IE7, but as soon as I figure out how to get things stabalized across all platforms it’ll be done.

Also, I tend to keep my resolution on the highest setting, so I imagine that things might look larger than intended if you have your resolution at a low setting, but as far as I know theres no real fix for that.

I’m happy with how well I’ve been able to establish Becky’s character in the few comics she’s been in. I’ve fought hard to make her feel three dimensional, and I think it’s working. When we first used her character, her IRL counterpart really couldn’t be in the comic much because of possible IRL fallout from it, so we needed to establish who she was without really giving her too much screen time, hence the matching sweatshirt. This also stemmed from real life a bit in that chuck and becky both wore alot of hooded sweatshirts, usually band shirts, although they never matched IRL. I’ve gotten to the point now where I can have her lose the sweatshirt without sacrificing characterization, which is good, because I think it was clear even before this comic, that Becky’s not the sort of chick who needs to be identified as being part of a couple, she’s an individual. In her mind a sweatshirt thats the same color as her fiance is happenstance.

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I’ve been working on this pretty non-stop, but the website design is coming along well. Pretty soon I’ll have the major work out of the way and I’ll be into those little details that make the site complete but are just tedious to do. Although I can’t imagine anything being more tedious than uploading the 500 or so comics from the various sites at which they’ve been hosted until now.

In comic related news this whole Jeanette Lee bit was initially quite long, and figuring out which jokes to keep and which to lose was a  painful process. There were initially four strips worth of jokes, which is admittedly too many comics about any Women’s Professional Nine-Ball Player, no matter how gorgeous and talented she may be.  The revelation that Chip doesn’t know who we’re talking about I think really tied the whole thing together. I purposely didn’t want to explain who she was in the comic, I think the relative obscurity of Jeanette Lee to the average household makes Nate’s hypothesis much ore fun than if it had been, say, Angelina Jolie or something.

Besides I’m not a big fan of Angelina Jolie. She’s a pretty indimidating chick. I’d be afraid she’d try to cut me or something while we were doing it.

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I can’t help but feel like this one would make way more sense had I done it back when I was actually in college. Then the age difference between Nate and Jeanette Lee would’ve been much smaller. Thats not so say she’s not still a hottie.  Wee-ow. Anyway I’m in the middle of the process of going back and attaching blogs to all my posts. Some of the comics are easier than others because I have certain memories attatched to them. This one goes back to when I worked as a cook and I had this conversation with some co-workers. Albiet I didn’t have to fill in their half of the conversation for them.

Chuck thinks we’re too mean to Chip. Ryan thinks we’re not mean enough. I can empathize with both their postions. I was thinking the other day about how many of our storylines really center around one or two characters, which we never really did intentionally. I think I might make it more intentional moving forward, its a great way to get more familiar with some of these characters.

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Developing three demensional characters is alot of fun, but it’s also alot of work. Instead of mulling over things like dialouge, you end up spending your time trying to wrap your head around the motivation of your characters. One of the major things that held up updates was that, for a while, I had Chuck acting out of character in the upcoming storyline, and it really bothered me. Then suddenly I had an epiphany about how he should feel about this girl Ryan brought over, and this conversation that he’d have with Becky, and everything just fell into place.

The little character interaction between Becky and Chuck at the very end here I think is, although not funny, important to developing their relationship with the readers. Although Becky is clearly upset at his statements (just like she’s spent a good deal of time upset at him in past strips) its really only a surface resentment, and a devils advocate position. Theres no substance to it. The characters both know this, but until now, I don’t know if I ever really conveyed it to the reader. It’s just a little thing, but I thinks really important.

See you in the funny pages!

This girl sure talks alot eh?  Its true that if you look back through the archives Chuck has no extended one-on-one time with any of Ryan’s girlfriends, and while previous storylines had alot of things happen off screen, the fact that Chuck hasn’t really dealt with any of Ryan’s girls in that time either I think reveals more about Chuck’s character than maybe we ever have before. Alot of the things that happen in this storyline pull us away from the gag-a-day format even further and develop these guys more three dimensionally than they ever have been before.

Someone once commented to me, after reading a few of the newer strips, that it seemed like Chuck was the main character, although after she read more she changed her mind to the “all three are the main character” which is more true. But the point is, Nate and Ryan both fit into pretty broad categories. Chuck was always the most normal of the three and so I had to do the most work to develop him as a character, so he would be memorable. I didn’t want it to be like Nate, Ryan, and the other guy, which I think it easily could’ve been if I hadn’t developed the comic in the right direction.

See you in the funny pages!

I think as a humor strip, this one is particularily weak. Although as character interaction I think it is really strong, and as one of the first new strips coming back from over a year off, it picks up alot of strings that I’d left dangling, including Becky and Chuck studying french, Nate being over tired, and plus it had a great throwback to this comic that was totally Ryan’s idea. In fact it was initially Ryan who was smacking Nate awake. This and the next comic were initially mostly about the kinky sex Ryan was having with the girl, but I wanted to establish things like Chuck having met the girl prior to her real introduction to everyone. There were a couple comics of Nate interacting with late nite commericals that were taken out of here as well, including a joke that dated back to 2002. Which I feel compelled to write about just because it was one of the original ones in our sketchbook. Nate is playing Parasite Eve and Chuck comes out and is like “this game is mad old” and Nate says “Yah, but if you can get to the top of the World Trade Center you unlock the secret ending. It’s taken me hours but I’m almost there” and Chuck says “You know she’s not naked in the secret ending right?” and Nate thinks for a minute and says “Yah, forget this old ass game.” or maybe “You don’t know that shit for sure!”

But you can see why I cut it. It wasn’t a very strong joke even when it was contemporary. I just have this urge to use some of the jokes we thought of when we were first building the comic, sort of an homage to where I was 6 years ago. But alot of those jokes just don’t fit what the comic has become, and I think deep down, I know it.

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I usually feel that if I tell a comic and people don’t get the joke, then thats my fault for not conveying it properly, for pacing it wrong, or for using the wrong words. There are only a couple comics in my archives that I feel like that about. I think in some cases the joke was just bad, and then, nothing I can do will really save it. But if I still think the joke is good, and but other people don’t “get it” thats my fault. I’m a bad stroyteller.

This is not one of those cases. This is one of the few cases where I did a joke that I new the very minority of people would get, because I liked it so much. Its really a joke for me, and while there are a few of them in CaP I try to make sure they’re few and far between. So, I think I owe you guys an explaination.

The field in panels three and four is the same field from panels three and four of this comic. So, the trap that Chip gets caught in is the same trap security set for the ghost runner earlier that day. Notice how happy the field is during the day… The reference is to the NES game Castlevania II: Simons Quest. In the game when night falls Simon says “What a horrible night to have a curse” and everything turns all spooky, enemies get harder and places that were safe during the day are now filled with zombies.

The comic make sorta makes sense even without the reference, but you won’t really “get it” unless you know it. But now you DO know it, so if anyone else makes an obscure niche reference to Simon’s Quest you’ll totally be on board. And if you got it before I explained it congratulations! Gold star!

See you in the funny pages