All the stupid stuff you ever wanted to know about this little site, right here:
Q. How did this all start?
A. It started on the forums of THIScomic, a psychological waste dump in form of a mental, very controversial webcomic of my good… acquaintance Ayden “Smayds” Wolf. It seems that I was very bored at work, so I drew the following:
- A photo-realistic Asian eye
- A very, very badly drawn, naive Simba (as a joke)
- A very, very swell Simba
- The same Simba, but with his head cut open
I posted them on that forum (that thread may be found here – WARNING: Explicit content), and Smayds was instantly all over it (how does he always do it?!). He praised me, and presented his own rendition of the gay rights Simba. I had nothing to do (and really, NOTHING to do), so I digitally inked and colored my Simba, with authentic Simba colors, shading, Disney-like strokes and all. After filling his sexual fantasies, Smayds insisted that I get a webcomic. Less than 24 hrs later I was writing this FAQ.
Q. Where did you get all the names, like Ante Mortem and Cox Limited Packaging?
A. I found Ante Mortem from Google’s first result to the search term “latin phrases”. The semi-hilarious Cox Limited Packaging comes unedited from Seventh Sanctum’s Corporation Name Generator. Chew on that for a while. Most character names are also from Seventh Sanctum.
Q. How do you draw it?
A. I do everything with Macromedia Flash MX, with occasional special effects with Adobe Photoshop CS. No paper or pencil was used in the making of this madness.
Q. Why this theme (website color scheme, layout etc.)?
A. I picked this particular theme (Silver is the New Black by Gregory Auld), because it was wide enough to support rather big pictures (most themes are ridiculously narrow, and uglify the pictures with horrifying browser image scaling). Also, they greyish feel is just what I was after with this webcomic, in contrast of banana splits or abstract greenery. This theme is also very light, as in, it doesn’t contain some much pictures as design elements. That sort of balances out the posts’ heavy images that are the comics themselves.
Q. What is that delicious font you are using in the comics?
A. It’s called DigitalStrip, and it is pretty ace indeed. Grab it here. If you’re too cool for zip, you can also Google it, but there are some questionable results in between, too, beware of them.
Q. Is there anything behind the character names?
A. Any names that might be in real life are purely coincidental, and no names are in any way parody or personal vendettas to anything real. As what really lies behind the character names:
- “Haykes” was the surname of my first The Sims 2 family.
- “Konei” was the surname of the title character in a massive writing project I took a long time ago but never finished (which is not a shame).
- “Garcia” is a surname in Call Of Duty 2, one of my favorite games besides The Sims 2.
- “Colin” is homage to one of the greatest comedians I know – Colin Mochrie.
- “Tucks” is homage to Tux, the Linux mascot.
- “Andrew” and “Lloyd” are references to a certain composer.
A little fetched? Bite me.
Q. When in the world do you have time to do all this?
A. There’s a nifty feature in WordPress that lets me post comics beforehand, and set them to appear on the website on a certain date and time. That way I only spend one Saturday or Sunday in making two weeks worth of comics. Furthermore, all characters and most backgrounds are predrawn, so I need to just copy premade grahpics and write new texts. It’s easier than what it might seem.
