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Sophomore Year
Friday, June 9th, 2006 by joelI spent my childhood, among other pursuits, collecting and reading comic strips from the funny papers. Yes, of course, later on I checked out these so-called “comic books� and eventually even that mysterious and bizarre thing called “manga�, but funny paper, laugh-a-day comic strips were the source material for me.
So naturally when I originally was asked by fans of my work to do a web-comic (self-aggrandizing and unbelievable as it seems, that actually happened), my first thought was to do it in the style of the comic-strips of my youth: a four-panel gag-a-day.
However, in looking at other web-comics with fan followings, I was also intrigued by the idea of a continuous story-line. I toyed with the idea of doing an online, graphic novel based on the story “Secrets of the Universe� that we had written in college.
What eventually came to be, what you see before you, is my attempt to do everything that I like in one comic strip. If I feel like doing a cowboy story, I have the role-playing game my characters participate in, Mystic Techno Cowboys. If I decide to do a gag, my characters can handle that, too. If I want to do a super-hero comic book, I have the Quiver game at my disposal. And, of course, there is an ongoing storyline that is both enigmatic and bizarre. Just the way I like it.
So the first few years of comics were a lead-up to, and finally telling of, the Secrets of the Universe story (you may recall, with the space ship abducting the dorm). When that was done, I had to tie up some loose ends and now I am moving on to the sophomore year for our characters. I may end up stalling indefinitely at sophomore year. There is still another graphic novel to tell, Secrets of Life, but that one scares me to death, so I may just spend the rest of my career on Secrets of the Universe stalling.
One of the chief complaints I have heard from fans is that there is an almost entire lack of female characters in the comic. I would have to site this is my foremost flaw as a writer is that I just cannot manage to write from a female perspective. I have, however, improved, and Sophomore year will introduce some female characters in a storyline of their own.
But before we kick Sophomore year off, please enjoy a week or two of sketches I have been doing as a lead-in.
