Gah! I had written this whole post and set the timer to go up at 6am this morning…and forgot to hit the schedule button! Foiled again!
Anybody who happened to read the Funnies archive from the beginning yesterday will have noticed a change (assuming you had read them from the beginning before that is). The first five strips have been replaced! Eventually the next ten strips will also be replaced as well.
The first fifteen strips were drawn using a variety of drawing programs as I was trying to figure out how best to do things. Starting with Funny 016 I switched to Manga Studio Debut since it offers a whole mess of panel layouts and tools for adding text balloons. That was a learning process in itself and it’s taken me a while to get used to it. At the time I didn’t want to go back and redraw the first fifteen strips, preferring to continue with new material. Obviously that’s changed now.
My desire is to collect the Funnies in trade paperbacks at some point. The first 15 strips were going to cause a problem, because the layout was different. I could have decided to do a little editing and paste the panels into MSD, but to be honest, they were poorly drawn (even by my standards) and turned out somewhat pixellated. I can’t imagine that they would have printed very well.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to draw certain characters and they look a lot better now than they did a few months ago, especially Sass. This way the artwork will be a little more consistent. There may still be a few jarring strips here and there, but I find that overall the archive looks a lot better.
But what will happen with the original fifteen (O15) strips? Well, I keep everything that I draw for the site for referencing purposes. Since I like to show the evolution of the work, I’ll probably add the O15 to the artwork section of the site when I finish replacing them all, so that people can see the difference (like I did for the original first strip).
ORIGINAL REVISED
