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In this case FAQ stands for frequently anticipated questions. No one
had yet asked me any of these when I first created this page (except as
noted), and now I suppose no one'll ever have to; but this seems to be the
standard set webcartoonists are asked.
What's your comic about?
When King Arthur drew the sword Excalibur from the stone, its magic proved
more powerful than even Merlin had known. It unmoored Arthur and his
contemporaries from their home time, so that sometimes they exist in their
original time, and sometimes they exist in the far future, and sometimes they
exist in our time, etc.
There's a New Reader Orientation page with about a
dozen cartoons summarizing the archive to date.
Why King Arthur?
Because, of the sets of characters I love best, this is the only one that
doesn't fall under someone else's copyright. So I matched it with a premise
versatile enough to simulate any of the others at will.
Why "of Time and Space"?
Being loosed in time, the characters are dropped into a variety of
storytelling genres. There are three major genre arcs for the webcomic's
projected twenty-plus thirteen year run. The fairy tale arc
(once called the medieval arc, but no more; see the essay on
this page) is also called the baseline arc
because it's an attempt to retell the classic King Arthur legend - as
faithfully as panel gags may be capable of retelling a story cycle which
originated in medieval romances that sometimes contradict each other - so
that deviations and similarities in other arcs can be contrasted by a reader
with only a moviegoer's knowledge of the legend.
- In the fairy tale arc Arthur is the High King of Britain in a time
that's nominally the fifth century A.D. but is laced with anachronisms and
fantasy.
- In the space arc Arthur is the High King of all British space
during the decline of the Roman interstellar empire, and commanding officer
of the starship Excalibur which is the largest and best spaceship
remaining in British space.
- In the contemporary arc Arthur is major stockholder and CEO of the
biggest corporation in the world, Excalicorp.
The major differences between these arcs at this writing:
- In the fairy tale arc, Arthur's reign is long settled down after several
years of succession wars. The affair between Guenevere and Lancelot has been
going on for years. Arthur remains fond of them both, and has implied to
the lovers (who know that the Merlin's omniscience means Arthur must know of
their affair) that he will not endanger the stability of the High Kingdom by
exposing them. Lancelot was tricked into conceiving a child, Galahad, on
Elaine of Carbonek; the combination of her machinations and Guenevere's
jealousy unhinged him, and he embarked on a two-year stint as a wild man in
the woods after which he was nursed back to health by Elaine but then
returned to Camelot. Arthur's nephews Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris and Gareth
are Round Table knights despite their parents' past rebellion (which got
their father King Lot of Lothian and Orkney killed). Tristram of Lyonesse was
also a Round Table knight, but hs been killed by his uncle Duke Mark for his
affair with Mark's wife Isolde, whom Mark also killed. Arthur learned that
the daughters of his father's enemy Duke Gorlois of Cornwall - Morgause the
mother of Gawaine and his brothers, Elaine and Morgan le Fey - are his
half-sisters; just after sleeping with Morgause and impregnating her
with the bastard son who shall one day, according to Merlin, destroy his
kingdom, Mordred. Morgan le Fey exposed herself as Arthur's enemy with a
plot to steal Excalibur, and is no longer among the court at Camelot; she
plots with faerie allies to become High Queen of Britain. Merlin has been
trapped in a cave by the new Lady of the Lake, Nimue, as he had been
predicting all along would happen; he didn't say it would be an accident on
her part. Guenevere's bastard half-sister also named Guenevere showed up at
Camelot and claimed to be the real High Queen, and Arthur went for it;
Guenevere, Lancelotspent two years in exile at Tristram's castle Dolorous
Gard before Mark killed Tristram and Isolde, but the false Guenevere died
and her magical hold on Arthur vanished.
- In the space arc Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot are all officers aboard
the starship Excalibur. Having served on the Excalibur since Arthur's
crowning (instead of, as in the fairy tale arc, arriving at Camelot after
the wedding) Lancelot realized he was in love with Guenevere just before she
got married; as in the fairy tale arc Guenevere came to realization during
their separation during Arthur's Roman campaign, and the affair began during
Arthur's Saxon Rock campaign. Because Morgan was Merlin's apprentice in
time-traveling, she and Arthur didn't realize she was his half-sister until
she was pregnant with Mordred; Merlin quickly returned her to her own time.
All in the present but Merlin and Morgan (and Morgause in whom Morgan
confided) remain ignorant Arthur has an heir. Morgan frankly admits to
plotting to become High Queen (her preference to being Queen Mother), but
has yet to be caught in legal proof of treason; in this time zone she also
has faerie allies. Also among the Round Table knights on Excalibur are
Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, Gareth, Griflet, Eglante the lady of Malehaute,
and Arthur's foster sibling Bedivere. Because of the time-travel anomaly,
Mordred is old enough to be an Excalibur knight, but no one on the Excalibur
knows he's Arthur's son, not even Merlin, or Mordred himself. Subsequent to
Elaine of Carbonek introducing Lancelot's infant bastard Galahad to the
Excalibur officers, Arthur made Elaine Excalibur chaplain. Merlin, after
serving under Arthur on the Excalibur for years, has had a new apprentice
assigned him, Nimue, and they now travel time and space in his time machine.
Guenevere was cloned by an ancient civilization's device: one served under
Arthur on the Excalibur and the other with Lancelot served Isolde and
Tristram on the Dolorous, until the deaths of Tristram, Isolde and the false
Guenevere.
- In the contemporary arc Arthur is a US citizen. At his eighteenth
birthday he came into his long-dead parents' controlling interest in
Excalicorp, the biggest megacorporation in the world. Merlin, Arthur's high
school art teacher and part-time boss at Merlin's comics shop, with the
parents' power of attorney had him raised in a middle-class foster family so
that as an adult he could run Excalicorp with the common touch. Arthur had
wanted to be a cartoonist (he still draws a daily webcomic) but now he runs
Excalicorp. Arthur, his foster siblings Kay and Bedivere, and Merlin lived
while Arthur was in high school in Springfield, a suburb of the Midwestern
major metropolis Camelot. Arthur met Guenevere, Lancelot and Tristram in an
online role-playing game. Lancelot is native to the east coast and Guenevere
to the west; both are now lawyers in Camelot. Lancelot's cousin Bors is a
priest. Both Guenevere's and Lancelot's families are more wealthy than
Arthur's foster family, but not than Arthur after he came into his
inheritance. Morgan was the high school's drama teacher during Arthur's
sophomore year, but she married rich and then quit teaching to go to
Hollywood. She had small and large parts in several movies and
popular tv shows, and has had her own sitcom. Nimue was here Merlin's
orphaned ward till his death. Tristram held a masters in piano and voice
from Camelot University, and led a jazz trio otherwise consisting of
Palodimes and Dinadan; Isolde was a doctor; Mark was a captain of corporate
industry but now is serving time for double murder. Morgause is in a position
of power at Excalicorp, acting CEO till Arthur came into his inheritance;
she acted as Arthur's mentor in the ways of corporate life during his school
years. Gawaine is a computer programmer for a major software corporation - he
and Arthur were freshman dorm roommates (now Arthur and Guenevere have moved
in together in one of his father's mansions). Through a convoluted series of
events Morgan is the gamemaster of the Friday night tabletop roleplaying
game. Arthur and Guenevere are married and have two boys, Mordred and
Galahad, and are Nimue's foster parents since Merlin's death. Guenevere and
Lancelot are having an affair. Guenevere, Arthur and Lancelot have each
independently realized that Galahad is Lancelot's child. While Guenevere and
Lancelot were off at law school together, Guenevere's twin sister Fasha lived
with Arthur to help him care for the boys.
- Tristram is male in the baseline arc, and female in the other two.
Through the first 1700 cartoons Bedivere was female in the contemporary and
space arcs too, but then he stopped. Tristram and Mark's wife Isolde carry on
an affair whether Tristram is male or not. Kay and Bedivere remained lovers
in the space and contemporary arcs even after Bedivere stopped being female.
Gawaine's siblings Agravaine and Gareth have been seen male in the fairy tale
arc and female in others. Other knights' gender may be bent across the
arcs too.
- In the fairy tale/baseline arc, Morgause is Mordred's mother. In the
space arc Morgan is Mordred's mother. In the contemporary arc Guenevere is
Mordred's mother.
Merlin's time-travel in the space arc has shown that others besides Arthur's
contemporaries (including but not limited to Hercules, Sinbad the sailor,
Ghenghis Khan, and their respective contemporaries) can be
proportionately displaced in time by Excalibur's magic. The contemporary
arc's occasional allusions to topical persons and elements of twenty-first
century life show that the magic isn't always a catch-all. Merlin has
demonstrated a limited ability to travel between the time zones at will, but
ordinarily not even Merlin and Arthur are even conscious that it happens at
all.
Secondary arcs to date include but are not limited to the western arc,
the movie parody arc, the MASH arc and the superhero
arc. In the Lord of the Rings movie parody several characters were of
course physically modified according to the movies' fantasy races'
characteristics. In the Star Wars parody Guenevere and Morgan were
combined into one character for the Princess Leia role. In the MASH arc
Morgan and Nimue are male. Arcs and parodies yet to come will no doubt
contain similar character manipulation.
To aid in identification across the arcs, characters' clothing is
color-coded (except in the MASH arc where of course everyone mostly wears
fatigues). Arthur wears yellow or in the olive-drab that's what you get when
you try to tint yellow. Guenevere's in shades of blue, Lancelot red - thus
the three primary characters of the legends wear the primary colors from the
color wheel. Secondary colors go to Merlin (orange), Morgan (green),
and Nimue (purple). Supporting characters wear variants of their closest
association's color - Gawaine in a yellow-green because he's Morgan's and
Arthur's nephew, Morgause in a dark green because she's Morgan's sister but
more Arthur's enemy than she, Agravaine in (most recently) Morgause-green
because s/he's more Arthur's enemy than Gawaine, Tristram's bandmates in pink
and red, etc. The combination Guenevere/Morgan character in the
Star Wars parody wears blue-green. (For more on the reasoning behind
the color-coding of the six leads see the newspost of this page.)
When Arthur, King of Time and Space pages are red instead of green,
that means the day's cartoon is set sometime in the future of the cartoon's
regular, current time. When Arthur, King of Time and Space pages are
blue instead of green, that means the day's cartoon is set sometime in the
past of the cartoons' regular, current time. Note that this displacement in
time hasn't anything to do with the timeshifting between story arcs. It's
relative to Arthur's time-hopping history, not absolute to time itself. There
could be a red-paged fairy tale arc cartoon that's set during the Renaissance
or a blue-paged contemporary arc cartoon that's set in 1976. (Black pages are
Arthur, King of Time and Space v2.0 - see question below or
the AKOTAS-2 FAQ.)
Retroactively, perhaps it's a separate arc when the characters step out of
the frames and speak out as fictional characters, the frameless arc,
but I don't track it separately in my notes. I do track separately the
filler arc, comprised of the cartoons uploaded on days when I've been
unable to draw a cartoon. Fillers are pulled from a reserve of cartoons
created expressly for the purpose (unless the reserve is empty). The only
format of the filler arc is that it has no format. Salutes to other webcomics were once usual.
Note this isn't a continuity strip at heart, it's gag-a-day humor. There is a
story being told here, but less as an epic than a biography, or a blog;
working less from a plot outline than from a calendar of landmark events.
Borrowing vocabulary from Stephen King, Arthur, King of Time and Space
is for the legends' breadcrumbs. If you're looking for more of the legends'
meat than this (actually, even if you aren't), I recommend the Arthurian
works listed in the influences paragraph below.
What's with the occasional MSPaint art?
Ordinarily at AKOTAS what I call triangle style is confined to
Arthur's webcomic-within-the-webcomic, and the normal daily updates are in
conventional line-drawing scanned into computer file with MSPaint. While I
don't agree with its many critics who find my triangle style inherently
inferior to my line-drawing style, it is admittedly easier to execute and,
for this reason, AKOTAS will sometimes be executed in triangle style
due to offline life constraints.
What's AKOTAS-2?
What's this "working sabbatical" you
mention sometimes?
For six months in 2009 I wanted to take a sabbatical from AKOTAS, but
while continuing to to keep my record of never missing a daily update.
Arthur, King of Time and Space version 2.0 (on black pages) was a
variation on fanfiction-derived Arthurian cartoons that were one step in the
creative process that led to AKOTAS. For details see
the AKOTAS-2 FAQ.
The working sabbatical had been planned to last two and a half years but only
lasted six months. Nevertheless, for reasons detailed on this page, I still aged the regular AKOTAS
characters those two and a half years.
In June 2011 I again put normal AKOTAS on a hiatus, until late 2011,
but instead of reviving AKOTAS-2 an alternate all-filler-sketch format
has been implemented. This hiatus will culminate in another skip of time in
the characters' lives, this time ten years.
Skipping those twelve years total does mean that AKOTAS' original
projected twenty-five year run will be truncated by that amount of time.
Instead of 2029 AKOTAS is now scheduled to end in 2017. Unless there's
another hiatus ...
What's your update schedule?
Daily. And I haven't missed an update since I started in 2004. That's with a
day job which I haven't any intention of leaving. There are very few
webcartoonists out there who have never missed a scheduled daily update over
a comparable or longer period unless they're cartooning professionals (or
aspire to be, or did aspire to be when they started and achieved it) who must
update for their living and their career. (And that's not to mention the
webcartoonists making their living at it who miss updates.) I'm proud of this
and I don't mind who knows it. I not infrequently write that to miss an
update I'd have to be in mourning, hospitalized or dead myself.
Originally, scheduled update time was 00:01 GMT. At the beginning of 2007 I
announced in a newspost that scheduled update time would be changed to a
window 02:00 00:00 till 06:00 GMT till further notice, in anticipation
of logistical difficulties that didn't actually materialize. I never retracted
the change because it's less stressful this way, because midnight GMT is the
dinner hour in my timezone so I frequently updated in the 00:00-06:00 window
anyway.
Why start a webcomic?
I've been drawing a cartoon a day since 1976, with the occasional hiatus.
As a method of distribution, putting them online beats carrying them around
in a blue three-ring binder.
Who are your influences?
Peanuts, B.C., Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle
illustrations, Phil Foglio's 70s Star Trek fanzine work. Storytelling
influences include the above plus A.A. Milne, Larry Gelbart and those who
wrote M*A*S*H under his administration, Garry Trudeau; science fantasy
influences include Star Trek, Doctor Who, Star Wars, the
Oz books, the Narnia books, Joss Whedon; Arthurian influences are primarily
T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The
Mists of Avalon and sundry literary and non-fiction works edited by
Norris Lacy.
What's your experience?
I've got insignificant paid experience as a cartoonist. But I've got the
unpaid experience noted in the Why a webcomic? question. Like many
webcomics, my blue binder cartoons depicted the cartoonist and his pals
involved in conflicts ranging from everyday frustrations to dark lords with
spacefleets. Aihok and Effex, here Merlin's characters and Morgan's fairy
allies, appeared in these. In the 70s I had stories published in two or three
Star Trek fanzines; in the 80s, two or three Doctor Who
fanzines. In the 80s I wrote and performed for the Chicago science fiction
comedy troupe Moebius Theatre, sold a few cartoons at science fiction
convention art shows, appeared in the APAzine Vootie alongside such as
Reed Waller, Ken Fletcher, Larry Beck and Tim Fay, and earned an A.A. at the
American Academy of Art in Chicago. In the early 90s I self-published two
fanzines: a Star Trek: The Next Generation novella The Legacy of
Kirk, and 500 Year Diary, a book of Doctor Who crossover
cartoons. Fanfiction cartoons appear regularly in the fanzine Alexiad
edited by Hugo-nominated writer Joe Major.
In the late 90s and early 00s I wrote stories and drew cartoons on a personal
website. That material was all fanfiction, primarily of Doctor Who,
Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That is, it was all
fanfiction until I started globally replacing each proper noun in my
Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover stories and cartoons with a
proper noun from the King Arthur legend and giving the new versions the
umbrella title King Arthur in Time and Space. This material of course
was the progenitor of the present work. (The reason no one asked me FAQs
before I composed this page is because most or all the readers I had then
followed me from that website to this one, and already knew all this. Many
such readers appeared in the blue binder cartoons.) The diskspace quota for
the fanfiction site filled up after ten years, so now I update fanfiction
cartoons at The Hero of Three
Faces.
Which of the characters is most like you?
Arthur is the innocent I hope I am. Merlin is the wise man I hope I am.
Guenevere is the free spirit I hope I am. Lancelot is the believer I hope I
am. Effex is my left brain and Aihok is my right brain.
Where do you get your ideas?
I hate that question.
How do you create a cartoon?
Once I've written the gag, I create a blank strip in MSPaint from a template
PNG file, delete default panel borders and add new ones as needed, and letter
dialog before I draw. Originally I drew with an "ultra fine point" Sharpie on
Mead Academie "Sketch Diary" paper, but shortly I switched to standard
copy/printer paper because the marker seems to bleed less. There was a period
when I drew a large percentage of the strips with a mouse in MSPaint; that
seems be a phase that comes and goes. Sometimes I draw with pencil - your
standard No. 2 - after I figured out how to change my MSPaint scanning
settings so that pencil lines show up. Because the scanner is also a copier,
sometimes I copy original pencils first to get them dark enough for the
scanner. I remember reading when young that Jim Berry, cartoonist of
Berry's World, used to photocopy his pencils rather than ink them and
lose their spontaneity.
I scan the drawings into MSPaint (when they aren't created there) then paste
up, clean up and color the strip there. Usually there's very little clean up
because I don't pencil before I ink (when I ink) and I don't use preliminary
construction lines (I recall astounding one or two fellow Vootie
contributors with that, the one time I jammed with them in person; as well as
Fred Berger when I was his student at the American Academy of Art). A weekday
cartoon usually takes half an hour or an hour to execute. A Sunday cartoon
there's no telling, which is why they get drawn on Saturdays.
A hiatus sketch takes five or ten minutes and is scanned and posted with
little or no postproduction. Light duty is the whole point of a hiatus
sketch.
The webcomic community in general regards MSPaint with unabashed disdain, but
so far it does pretty much everything I
need done. The webcomic community also dislikes the font I use, Comic
Sans MS, but that appears to me an overreaction to its overuse in the
long-past early days of webcomics so I ignore it. Plus, when I went online in
1995 I made a conscious decision to live my online life as much as possible
through industry standard system defaults, i.e., software that can be found
standard on any Windows machine. I also handcode my websites with the HTML I
know, so that I know if something goes wrong I did it and I can fix it.
Consequently the work I do today can pretty much be done, with at most minor
inconvenience (particularly given the files I carry around with me on a flash
drive), at almost any desk in the world. (Once when I wrote this at
some online forum or other the rebuttal was attempted, "Photoshop is pretty
standard nowadays." I responded, "It didn't come on any of my computers.")
How is the website maintained?
(Edited from a news section essay in response to a reader's questions.) I've
typed the code for every page on this site myself in the Windows text editor
or, since Windows Vista doesn't include the old text editor, Notepad. I use
green backgrounds because I once read that green's the color easiest on the
eyes. I don't know PHP (I don't even know what the acronym stands for). Every
day I must edit or create the pages for the archive, the new cartoon, the
previous day's cartoon and the index page, in order to update all links
properly; and if there's a news section then that must be pasted into the
news archive page.
I've always believed in easy-loading web pages (which is why I didn't
put comic strips on the web back in the dialup age as did
Scott Kurtz and
Pete Abrams and others
who are now the old men of webcomics). Even if I ever learn fancier code, my
look may not change much.
What music inspires Arthur, King of Time and
Space?
I'm a child of "classic rock", movie soundtracks and Muppet music. That said,
most of the music that inspires me does so for associations I bring to it. I
like jazz, but the jazz I like best is reinterpretations of melodies I
already know (like Ahmad Jamal's rendition of Suicide is Painless or -
my favorite piece of recorded music of all time - Eumir Deodato's Also
Sprach Zarathustra). Stealing the Enterprise from the Search
for Spock soundtrack, and the fifteen minute version of the 70s disco
suite of Star Wars themes, mean Arthur, King of Time and Space
to me through association with material that inspired it, and because there's
not a lot of modern pop music inspired by King Arthur. There is Rick
Wakeman's album King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Is
that its name?) of which my favorite track is Merlin because I like
instrumentals. The 1812 Overture is my theme for the battle of
Bedegraine and for the space arc version of [spoiler deleted]. There's
a folk song called (here's another title I'm probably mangling) I'll
Give You My Riley to Ride 1952 Vincent about a bad boy who leaves his
bike to his girl, which makes me think of Merlin and Nimue (that tells
you more about those characters than any cast bio ever could). Early on
Guenevere adopted Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves as her
theme song. The day the western arc debuted, Lancelot staked out the Eagles'
Desperado. This cartoon established Still
the One as Arthur's and Guenevere's song.
When I like a piece of music I'll listen to it over and over. When I started
drawing a cartoon a day in 1976, I picked out the longest single piece I had
in my collection, so that I'd have to turn the phonograph needle back least
often while drawing. In that way the alltime theme for my daily cartoons
became the Ballet for a Girl from Buchanan suite on Chicago II.
When I finally started buying CDs almost the first thing I did was rectify
the total lack up till then in my music collection of Vince Guaraldi
Peanuts music. If and when Arthur, King of Time and Space is
animated for the screen, its theme will be Greensleeves arranged for
jazz trio.
When are you going to offer swag?
I'm putting off offering merchandise - or even figuring out how to, or what
merchandise - until or unless I need supplemental funds to maintain the site,
or until enough readers ask me this question that I believe there's a
market. Make me an offer.
I hope to eventually offer print collections of the cartoons despite their
low resolution. Some browsing at Lulu.com in 2006 made me much more optimistic that this
will eventually happen. As of the latest update date at the top of this page,
I mean to wait till the end of the regular run and look into putting out a
best-of volume or set of volumes.
When are you going to offer an RSS feed?
I've looked into RSS more than once and it appears to be just beyond my level
of technical expertise. But David Morgan-Mar has set up AKOTAS as one
of the webcomics available at Archive Binge RSS feed, and there's a button
for that on the AKOTAS main page.
Which are your favorite webcomics?
The ones linked on the index page.
What's in the future for Arthur, King of Time and
Space?
I originally intended to tell the story of King Arthur in real time in daily
panel gags over twenty-five years, less as a novel than as a journal, as if
it were Arthur drawing one of those cartoonist-and-his-pals webcomics;
because of the sabbaticals/hiatuses and their attendant timeskips the
projected lifespan of the story is now thirteen years. It's gotten more
"adult-oriented" as it goes along, as you knew it would if you also knew the
legend. But not graphically so, as I don't need some parents' watch
organization suing me because a fourth grader found graphic cartoon sex on
my site while researching King Arthur for class. Nowadays Starz Network has
more to worry about on that score than I do. AKJOTAS's has had some
blood and language though.
Will you draw your female characters naked for me?
All webcartoonists get asked this. Look here, and here,
and here. Or make me an offer.
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