Thanks for reading.
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4/14/11
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Recording the creative process
I don't recall whether I've mentioned in this space that the interstellar travel storyline in Arthur's webcomic is based on one I drew in the 80s when my pre-internet audience was a group of Chicago science fiction fans, in which an invented character sent myself and my former college roommate (the person whose birthday I've given to Lancelot) to Alpha Centauri while Aihok and Effex (who were my characters long before they were Merlin's) roomed with my old roommate. Today's gag and tomorrow's, as originally presented in 1982, depicted my roommate and me going about in spacesuits, just as Arthur and Lancelot above are doing. But those cartoons were pencil drawings on notebook or printer paper, distributed by being passed around parties and weekly meetings in a three-ring binder. In other words, uncolored. I could write comedy duo dialog for a paid of anonymous spacesuits without deciding which of my roommate and myself was delivering which stupid lines. But it's a convention of AKOTAS, and of the cartoon-within-the-cartoon here, that the characters always wear the same identifying color. Adapting the gags I'm using today and tomorrow for AKOTAS from my 80s cartoons entails actually picking which of these characters speaks which of these lines, which is something I was happy not to have to do in these gags' previous appearances. As I write this post I actually haven't done that yet, because I'm putting it off. I'm not sure why I'm putting it off. I'm not sure why avoiding that decision in the past has been important to me, or why having to make it now kinda freaks me out. But it does. In other news, today's the anniversary of the day in 1994 when I started drawing pencil pre-web webcomics for the science fiction fans I knew in Louisville. ...I think it was 1994. I guess you're getting old when you remember the date of an anniversary but not the year. I could always get out of my chair and go look in the blue binder in the bookshelf upstairs. But that'd be cheating. |
| Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, For Better Or For Worse, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance, Irregular Comic | Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: General Protection Fault, Nukees, Newshounds, Spacetrawler, Girl Genius, Ctrl+Alt+Del | Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: El Goonish Shive, Striptease, Punch an' Pie, Blue Milk Special, The Gutters |
| Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, LuAnn, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Devil's Panties, Narbonic, Schlock Mercenary |
| Webcomics I read weekday evenings: Questionable Content, Count Your Sheep, Dinosaur Comics, Scenes from a Multiverse, Medium Large, Girls With Slingshots, Shortpacked, Wapsi Square, Help Desk, LitBrick, Real Life, PvP | Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: xkcd, Two Lumps, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Bruno, Sheldon, Little Dee, Penny Arcade | Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Get Out of My Head, Starslip Crisis, Darths & Droids, Megatokyo, Bruno, Sheldon, Little Dee, MythAdventures |
| Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Station V3, Sinfest, Skin Horse, Peanuts |
Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian
Legend
Arthuriana - the
Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the
North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four
Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW -
The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged
entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Early British Kingdoms - Arthurian Bios.
Historia Ecclesiastica.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble
Knights of the Round Table,
Volume 1 and
Volume
2.
