Metatextual Madness: The following is a brief history of Molly, and how she ended up drawing my fake comics.  Not that anything I ever write is brief.

Back around 2006, I was toying around with a comic strip that would focus on Basil’s family back home.  It was titled “Meanwhile in Wisconsin” and featured Robyn (before she became Lara Croft) and the sisters left behind - Nicki, Jordan, and Sophie.  I wrote a few scripts for it, and even drew around ten comics before scrapping the project.  I don’t think any of it ever showed up online.

Anyway, I needed Nicholle to have some sort of hobby beyond being a sarcastic asswipe, so I decided to make her a webcartoonist.  I mean, hey, in a world of superheroes, detectives, and secret agents, it was about time I finally wrote from experience.  Of course, since the project went nowhere, I didn’t really run much farther with the idea.  That said, it did show up just a bit online when Nicholle showed up later in Flint Again / Flat Feet.

After that, I still wanted to work out what to do with Basil’s family, and after that little run of FA strips in Spring 2007, I hit my sketchbook with more ideas.  While drawing way too much during my myriad of literature classes, it occurred to me that - instead of drawing a strip about all the Flint girls - I could build a comic solely around Nicholle and her relationship with other cartoonists.  I mean, hey, I might as well write what I know.  Not that I know anything about being a teenage girl, but webcomics?  Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good handle on that.

In creating Nicholle’s world, I didn’t wanna use any actual webcartoonists, so I built a collective for her, based loosely on the then-active Girl-O-Matic, consisting solely of a few other female cartoonists.  The collective was, in a rather sexist way, named “OMG Girl Comics.”  The other girls are irrelevant to our discussion, but this where Molly O’Malley (later Fitzpatrick) appeared in my sketchbook.  I changed her last name because it was too similar to Martina O’Reily.

Now, with Sporkman on indefinite hiatus at the time, I decided that Nicholle’s art style was going to use the art style from that strip.  Molly’s art style had to be more original, and it came together remarkably quickly.  Deciding that she’d be drawing a blog comic about her life in high school, I started sketching Molly herself as a barely fleshed out stick figure, which led rather naturally to the title of her fake comic, “My Life in Sticks.”

This was sometime in mid-to-late 2007.  Now, all of this work went absolutely nowhere, despite me going so far as to create a whole new project for Nicholle’s fake comic as well.  Sadly, it all got shelved, most because all of my work got shelved in late 2007 when I ended up becoming a full time teacher.

Months later, having been canned from my job in May 2008, I started working on comics again.  FA was relaunched as Flat Feet, and - shortly after a Comic-Con full of peer pressure - Sporkman returned, with the Flint sisters as his supporting cast.  This finally gave me the opportunity I needed to introduce Nicki’s unprofitable career publicly, and so I did.  I established that she was drawing a comic based upon Sporkman’s adventures, having grown tired of her original strip (which I titled, but never mentioned in-comic, “Feminine Hygiene Products”).  This actually opens up the possibility that all of Classic Sporkman came from Nicki’s pen, since I consider that her art style now, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Molly finally appeared online later that month in 2008, but disappeared just as quickly.  Had the relaunched Sporkman made in until July 2009, Molly probably would’ve shown up in a Comic-Con storyline, but such things were not to be.

Almost a year later, never one to let a good character go to waste, Molly made her second appearance, this time as Deirdre’s friend in Delusionary State.  In the world’s most obscure in-joke, since only I would actually get it, I drew her as a something of a semi-realistic stick figure.

Shortly after that cameo, I drew the first eight Lit Brick comics… and sat on the project for almost a year before finally posting them in April 2010.  The rest, as they say…

(Source: troutcave.net)

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