©2007 by Peter Bernhardt. All rights reserved.

Author's Notes:

I'm not proud of many things in life; this comic continues that tradition. I decided to use it as a sort of practice comic for my coming back to drawing exercise this week. This comic came out of the cigar box when I looked at my scripted comic for this week and I said "Holy crap! This has way too many panels, the action sequences are complex, there are a lot of crowd scenes, and I don't even know if I remember how to draw at all! I CAN'T DO THIS YET!!!" So I put it away and thought of an uncomplicated, one-set comic with a bunch of very familiar characters. Basically, I didn't want to work too hard (which is a foolish wish, considering even the Uggers & Jooge comics are rather time-consuming). So I remembered this one and I quickly mentally story-boarded the whole thing out and got to work!

"Hey, this isn't so bad! Why did I put this off for so long???" Oh yeah, my hand shakes, I try to be a perfectionist on every frame (you'd never guess), I sweat over the inking part and I worry about crumpling the paper when erasing the pencil lines (which I almost always do), and then coloring on my slow laptop with half the pixels on the monitor dead is EXTREMELY time-consuming (I can watch an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus in the time it takes to save my progress on a comic). If my comic spills over onto a second page (i.e. most of them) then the time is more or less doubled. So basically, whenever I do a comic all in the same day (I usually split it up though) it pretty much means the whole day is shot (my longest comic, the Mermaggedon one, took in the vicinity of 10 hours start to finish).

Why does it take me this long? Because I am pretty much very slow at everything I do; I want to make sure what I'm doing is done right, and I think that in the end I put out a quality, full-color comic. Yes, I put them out slowly, but that's about 80% due to my being unable to get myself to actually start (because the task is rather daunting) and 20% because of my attention to detail. Sure, I could cut "production value" and put out the comic more often, but I don't want to compromise the quality/length/story of the comic in any way, really, because I have a particular vision in mind that I don't want to cheapen so I can improve my posting frequency. I don't want to pick on any specific webcomics, but let's just say that if I made a single-panel comic that featured a foul-mouthed stick figure drawn in Sharpie and posted as-scanned, then yes I could put out a comic every day. And I know, there are some beautiful (even masterful) multi-page, full-color comics that are posted multiple days a week, but I am willing to bet that the artists of those comics do not work full-time jobs that leave them mentally tired at the end of the day. Not that I am getting down on these people. I say more power to the teenager who works part-time or the professional artist who loves to draw all day and have comics in the Top 10 spots on bCx and TWC. And of course, more power to the people who are just plain better artists than me.

Hows that for a rant?

Wait, did it even have a point?