Another blog comic from Molly, dated as taking place the day after the last one I posted. Panels 2 and 3 are basically just copy and pasted from Twitter; which is to say, Dan wrote his own dialog. Thanks, Twitter!
EDIT: Dan later replied to this strip and typed what is possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever read on Twitter: “Nicholle’s just mad because she’s the moon.”
(Source: litbrick.com)
Having finished an entire week of Lit Brick in a single day, I now have nothing to do but draw things for fun. Thus, My Life in Sticks returns. This one is fictionally dated as July 25th, 2008.
A few things to note: first, I’ve finally answered the question of what Comic Trout draws, since it obviously can’t be the same as Real Trout’s work. Simply put, he draws a different stupid detective comic. Second, it’s sort of odd that Comic Trout is the idiot in this comic. It’s like I’m actively trying to not make him a Mary Sue. Finally, the fact that Dan is apparently becoming a regular in this comic amuses me far too much.
These four strips have all been from Molly’s blog strip in and around Comic-Con time, mostly because that’s the most fun for me to focus on. Of course, she would’ve drawn strips every other day in the year as well, so maybe I’ll get to some of those eventually too.
(Source: litbrick.com)
This is an experiment. I think it looks neat, and it fits the material. I’d like to know your guys’ opinion about it if you’d care to share.
Very soon I’ll be getting a new Comicpress site up for Classic Sporkman Remastered. I love the classic Sporkman strips, but they’re very… imperfect. The inking was on paper and is thick and sloppy. The lettering is both inconsistent and crowded because of the smaller width of the strips. They’re in black and white when Sporkman really needs to be in color. Basically, they’re just severely flawed.
But I love them.
So, to entertain myself when I need a break from other projects, I’m remastering the old comics. I’m digitally inking over the original artwork, making very little in the way of changes besides just cleaning up the mess. Then I’m coloring and lettering them in the same template I use for Lit Brick and other strips now.
Basically, the old strips will look new, and I will be happy. This isn’t a scheduled comic, and I have no idea how long it’ll be before I’ve finished them all. This is just for fun when I need a distraction.
Anyway, this is the first one, dated on the original artwork as being from June 25th, 2004.
(Source: sporkman.com)
Deleted Sporkman #02: This entry from the Forgotten Binder of Doom wasn’t numbered, but is dated as March 5th, 2005. This actually confuses me a little, since March 5th was in the midst of that little storyline where Andie created the Negaspork. I suspect I had just built up a good buffer at that point and that - while drawn on March 5th - the strip would’ve been posted later on in the month.
Interestingly, this strip was fully inked on paper, which implies that I planned to post it online until the very last second. Be that as it may, I reinked it today in Illustrator as part of my continuing effort to “remaster” Classic Sporkman. I’m doing as little as possible to change the line art during this process, as I’d like to retain the charm of the original artwork from 2005. The only reason I’d reink a fully-inked comic like this is because the original ink was thick and sloppy. The digital inks are a marked improvement, and blend better with the new colors and letters.
(Source: sporkman.com)
My Life in Sticks, fictionally dated July 27th, 2008. I’m pretty this comic is okay since Meredith sliced all that hair off shortly after the Con.
(Source: litbrick.com)
Another entry of Molly’s blog comic, My Life in Sticks, fictionally dated as being from July 21st, 2006. Making these is way too much fun.
(Source: litbrick.com)
Deleted Sporkman #01: This comes to us from an 8.5x11 sheet of paper I had stuffed into a three ring binder. As with most of the rejected strips I’ll be posting, it’s not exactly genius. Then again, Classic Sporkman never was.
This was fully penciled and about 1/4 of the way inked, so apparently I thought it was “good enough” for a while before giving up. Sharing the page with this strip is another four panels featuring nothing but script. Since I’m not planning on actually drawing anything new for this series, don’t expect to actually see it anytime soon.
The script describes Sporkman on the run from a group of both pirates and ninjas. The mob corners our hero somewhere, but suddenly can’t agree on how to kill him because the pirates can’t understand Japanese. Hilarious.
The page with these comics is undated, but I labeled it as being “#18/19.” The numbers refer to my bizarre ordering system for Classic Sporkman, in which - after the first 25 “origin” strips - I started numbering the strips anew, because I considered the “one-shots” slightly different than the origin story that proceeded them.
In any event, One-Shot #17 was “Choosing Wisely” with the Grail Knight, which dates these comics to January 2005. Huzzah. They were subsequently replaced by “Evil Acquaintances,” the three strips introducing Andie, which are officially the real #18-20 in my records.
(Source: sporkman.com)
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)
