lavaside rahi

I figured it was about time for another round of these...I present the #160s! --- This was an exciting comic to make, but I grant I would probably do it a little differently today. Now I thought it moved the story along pretty well and some of the backgrounds are excellent - I worked hard to get the angles right, and it shows (although those angles where they're on top of the monorail are off - it looks like they're thousands of feet in the air, which would be rather unlikely). I think this is really where my backgrounds started to shine. I'm a geek about mass transit, so I tried to replicate the experience of a real urban transit system as best I could. The "42S" mentioned in the eighth panel is based on the real-life (but now decommissioned) 42S line in Pittsburgh, where my family was living at the time (I was living on my own in Albuquerque at this point) - if you're familiar with Pittsburgh, you might recognize those neighborhood names - Beechview is where my family was living. My one regret with this comic is that I think I made it way too preachy at the end there, with UM's little speech. In my mind I wanted to establish the difference between UM (noble, righteous, moralistic) and Larry & Tarry (slightly less so - more pragmatic and maybe a little cynical) but looking back on it now this makes me cringe. There were much more subtle ways of getting this point across. This was a fun one, if just for the duplicated image at the bottom. Though it occurs to me I should have also flipped the bottom image horizontally, so that it really would have looked the same from UM's perspective. I thought about doing other "Lessons in Comic Making" strips, but I never seemed to have any good ideas for what topic to do next. Oh well. Oh yeah, this was awesome. B) After coming up with the occasional acronym, I decided I had to go all out and just deliver a whole slew of them. I think N.E.R.D.S. is my favorite, but B.U.R.P. and O.O.P.S. are good too. The others are okay, but those three are my favorites. They all took a surprisingly long time to come up with (well, I think B.U.M. was a quick one). I think this comic holds the distinction of being the only comic without any of my characters in it. If not, it's the only one without any of my or any Bionicle characters. Of course, that was made up by the fact that Jon Stewart (whose sprite needs a little work, I admit), Stephen Colbert, and Barack Obama are in it. If there's one thing I'd change about this comic, it'd have to be that last panel. Don't get me wrong - I'm not ashamed of putting Obama in my comic (on the contrary, I'm immensely proud of my portrayal of him), but the dialogue is off. If you read it, it sounds like he's talking about bringing change, then proposing an action which would keep things just the way they are. You could read a serious political statement into that, which was not my intention. So please, don't read anything into that. It's just sloppy writing. What's funny is that when I made this comic, I hadn't seen The Room yet, but if you're familiar with Tommy Wiseau's accent, then that is exactly what I was going for with Kyeti there. Your tearing me apart, Me-lee-sa! Oh hai Larry! I'm pretty sure that line in the second-to-last panel is ripped off from an early Calvin and Hobbes strip. This is way more true than I care to admit. Oh man, I was on a raging roll with this one. Political cartoons so frequently disappoint me. I enjoy political humor (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are idols of mine) but editorial comics are so frequently bland and just plain awful. Everything Larry & Tarry say here is totally me - I hate it when cartoonists feel the need to label everything in sight (yeah, throw subtlety out the door why don't you?) and they always have the worst metaphors and puns imaginable. And some of them are just impossible to understand. Politics could be so much more interesting to the casual bystander if cartoonists could be original and entertaining. [/rant] Okay, I'm better now. In case you weren't around BZPower for this, the forums were shut down for weeks (I can't remember why, some kind of hack or glitch or something) and when they finally came back, all the posts made in the last six or so months had to be deleted. It was so weird to finally come back only to find a past version of BZPower waiting for you. Hence the time travel idea. I am immensely proud of my 2001: A Space Odyssey tribute (by which I mean rip-off) here. Once it occurred to me that I could expand the dark brown areas of my mask to make it look like wrinkles, I could do an "aging" process pretty easily. There's that one point where I added some white hair and softened the eyes, but mainly I focused on the amount of dark brown. I don't think I've seen aging sprites in a BZP comic - if you have, let me know where I can see it. I'm curious to see how others did it. Not a whole lot to say about this one. Learning my lesson from the last Birth of UM comic, I toned down the preachy in this one. Here it's just the mystery and the escape from the police. Though I grant by this point in the series I felt like I might be dragging the story a bit, hence the attempt to really focus it starting with the next part.

JJ returneth! Dude, awesome to see you still around!

Well, I think it's about time for another one of these! On to the #150s! --- *squeals with delight* Man I was excited about this comic. The coloring, the action, the killer dialogue...this is where I would show Larry and Tarry's kicking-butt-and-taking-names side. I mean...MAN do I love this comic. Woo! Though in retrospect I could have done away with that intro. There's some decent jokes in there (I think the "It's one of my FAVORITES" line comes from those South Park DVDs where every episode starts with Matt Stone and Trey Parker saying that the episode is one of their favorites), but it takes away from the action and drama of the rest of the comic. Also as you can tell from reading the rest of the series, the Birth of UM storyline was as much an excuse to explore Larry and Tarry's origins as it was to explore UM's, and in the end it became more about Larry and Tarry. I guess I just cared about Larry and Tarry more. Or, more likely, I just wanted to show the gritty, kicking-butt story more than I wanted to show the mystical story. Ideally I would have found a better balance, but there you go. In case you couldn't tell, LR was having a dream. Given the length of Comic 154, I'm just going to link to it. Hole. Lee. Shmokes. If it wasn't for that standard guest star room background I don't know if I ever would have managed to finish this comic. I mean...Holy cow. It's by far my longest comic. I'm pretty sure the idea of the guest star room control getting mixed up with the neighbor's garage door opener was Jphyper's idea, so kudos to him there. Geez, there's just so much in this comic. I guess the thing I like most was that I made fun of a bunch of guest star cliches here, namely Star Wars fans and violent guest stars (I still get a chuckle out of the "Not another one of you creepy violent types" line). Though the best guest stars are the ones that give you more to work with, and there's a few of those in here, namely BioNinja and Sura-Z (seriously, how fun is Sura-Z's thing? That is awesome!), and referencing my indifference to Philipnova was fun to write, even if it was sad in its truthfulness. Not a whole lot to say about this one...I like Ricardo's body design here - I knew I wanted him to look somewhat alien but still fit in with the Razor sprites, and it worked pretty well. And I like all the background flourishes, like the bulletin board in the ninth panel and the bridge in the fourth (foreshadowing!). The binocular view in the twelfth panel is definitely a throwback to Tintin. Really don't have much to add here...Originally, I had an idea that the professor would turn against UM after being captured, but after I took an anthropology class from a guy who was only the funniest, coolest teacher I ever had, I decided I just couldn't make the professor a bad guy. I like the idea of Larry and Tarry being Robin Hood-like figures here, trying to help this neighborhood that's on hard times. Ah, and the introduction of Tarry's love...Though I'm really not sure why I felt the need to insert Susanna. I think the idea was to differentiate Tarry from Larry a little, with Larry being slightly more cocky and Tarry being a touch more gentle (only a touch though, their personalities are still pretty close), giving the edge to Tarry when it comes to Susanna's love. Introducing Susanna also added some drama to the series, which was welcome. But I'm still not completely sure I made the right choice with giving Tarry a girlfriend...I mean, I don't regret it, but I wonder if it muddled up the relationship between Larry and Tarry - they're two parts of the same whole, you can't really have Larry without Tarry or Tarry without Larry. But I had also wondered what exactly the relationship was between Larry and Tarry - at times I thought of them as twin brothers (and they do get referred to as "twins" by other characters once in a while), but at other times I wondered if they were just very close friends, or even (prior to introducing Susanna) if they were gay. Ultimately I decided it was a question best left unanswered, but inserting Susanna into the mix just seemed to confuse me that much more. It's amazing how much time I can spend thinking about these two characters. They're like real people to me, there's just layers and layers of personality to them for me, and I only barely tapped into that with what I did even across all of my comics. Well, enough of that serious stuff, back to something silly. Boy, did I enjoy making this comic. I had found a decent fire kit on the internet, Jphyper had sent me an idea about Kyeti being windblown into something (given that he was made of crystal), and I decided it had been a while since I had given SK and VC a spot in a comic. All these factors combined into a comic that was just goofy fun.

Continuing with the list theme I attempted on April Fools Day, I thought I'd tackle a new one: the best comic makers who, for some reason, no one seems to remember these days. Let me emphasize that this list is completely biased. I only chose things that I held an interest in, and as you probably already know, my perspective of the comics forum has been fairly limited for most of the time I've spent here. Plus there's probably going to be some dispute about whether some of these guys are really "unremembered". So I totally welcome hearing about your favorite comic makers no one remembers in the comments. #5: Skye Green Okay, so technically not a comic maker (as far as I know), but just overlook that for a moment. Because Skye Green came up with a pretty unique idea: Skye Green's Quest (far) To Guest (star). Essentially, Skye Green would try to guest star in every comic series on BZPower and post the comics on his topic. Sadly, it didn't get very far. But it was still an awesome idea, so you gotta give him kudos for that. #4: Motago Back in the day, Motago was pretty big, so there's probably a few people around who remember this guy. Motago was a Razor comic maker who made an animated series (which was a pretty big deal at the time) called The Motago Show. This wasn't his only work - my favorite stuff from him was a series of MNOLG2 edits (taking a screen shot from the game and editing it to make it funny), but sadly the images have been lost to the deepest digits of the internet. Fortunately, you can still see the Motago Show on this Brickshelf folder. Sure, it seems simple now, but like I said it was a big deal when it first came out and its still got good humor. #3: JuJu Dark709 may have popularized the movie trend in the comics forum, but JuJu was the guy who actually started it all, with The Mask Of Sleeping, which was followed up with a sequel, MOS 2: Broken Dreams. The animation is incredibly smooth and way ahead of its time for BZPower, and the story is awesome. If you want to watch it, the links are broken but easy enough to fix: just click on the links, and when the "Page Not Found" page comes up, replace the word "pizzerias" in the URL code with "majhost", and you'll be set. #2: Bionicle Dragon BD, oh BD, where have you gone? Even today, Bionicle Dragon remains easily one of my favorite comic makers of all time. He just had it all: an awesome sense of humor with smart, witty jokes and clever use of slapstick, he knew how to make a comic look good, and he constantly churned out comics. He worked in a lot of stuff (I had the honor of working with him for a time in The Comic Land Files), but for me his definitive work will always be Crazy Bzpers. If you're searching for comic making genius, look no further (again, the links are broken but have the same issues as JuJu's stuff - just replace the word "pizzerias" in the URL code with "majhost"). #1: Leppy Seriously, why don't people bring up Leppy more often? If BZPower was a physical place, I'd say we need to commission a statue of this guy. Maybe someone should create an award in his name. Now to be fair, a lot of people seem to remember him for creating Dark709's Comics: The Game, which was a huge deal and a massive undertaking, and it's totally freaking awesome. And it's only one of the games Leppy created, and they're all pretty good (Binky Island is another favorite of mine). But few people seem to remember what Leppy did for comics. Firstly, the Razor 360 Kit, which completely changed the way I used Razor. Granted, when Leppy came out with the 360 kit Dark's Chimoru kit had already been out for a while and was gaining in popularity, so Leppy's contribution to Razor may have been somewhat muted by the fact that fewer people were using Razor. Shame, really. But that's not all: Leppy also made comics. Specifically a delightful little series called Moronicle, which has some of the best slapstick humor and (naturally) some of the best use of the Razor kit I have ever seen (again, the links are broken but easy to fix - just replace the word "pizzerias" in the URL code with "majhost"). They were completely awesome and always made crack up. Truly, Leppy was a multi-talented dude, and for this he scores #1 on this list.

Just a quickie announcement, I decided to rename this blog! The "rahi Roars" pun was cute, but I felt like it was time for a name more fitting to the theme of this blog. So there you go.

If it happened around April 1st, I'd count it as a yes.

Well, it's that time of year again. When BZPower undergoes another onslaught of April Fool's pranks, catching those unaware of the date off guard and causing those aware of the date to post "O Rly? " in just about every topic on the forum (personally I find those posts rather annoying, but I accept them as a part of the holiday). Now I couldn't come up with any good April Fool's prank myself; I don't have a comic series anymore and it seemed needlessly cruel to announce that I was returning to the comics, even for an April Fool's prank (by the way, go check out Varaka's new comic series). So this year I thought I'd do something else: honor the best April Fool's pranks Artwork III has given us and pay tribute to them. ...And that's when it occurred to me that there just aren't very many notable pranks in the forum. In fact, after all my research, I could only come up with two. There's plenty of April Fools comics, but genuine pranks seem few and far between. ...Ah, screw it. I'll do it anyway. Here's my tribute to the two greatest pranks of the Artwork III forum (if you know of any others, please let me know). - The International ComicContinuity Disbands - (3L)²: Live, Learn and Lawsuits™, starting here Last year, Kahinuva announced that there was just too much arguing in the ICC, and the group was disbanding. To make it official, Kahi removed the ICC from his signature and his comic topic and the Mask of Existence topic was closed (and for some reason never reopened...). The other ICC members played along, and Philbert Flakes announced an new continuity called the International ComicContinuity II, which attracted genuine interest. But what really made the prank wonderful was that it lasted an entire week. Yep, just to really seed doubt that this wasn't a hoax, the ICC remained disbanded for an entire week. Finally, on April 8th Kahi posted a comic announcing that he was retiring...only to then announce that the whole thing was in fact a joke. Kudos to you, sir. - Dark709's Retirement - Dark709's Comics Version 4.0, starting here We all remember this one. After five years of making comics the most popular comic maker BZPower has produced was finally going to hang it up. The remainder of the third movie would be posted as a narration and a final animation would be posted as a farewell to his fans. The statement was released on March 29th and confirmed by Superkid. For three days, well-wishers flooded the topic with goodbye messages, in post and comic form. Truly, it would be a sad day for us all...Dark posted the farewell animation... ...And we all got rickrolled. Now to be fair, there was plenty of speculation and a lot of people recognized it as an April Fools prank right away (all the speculation posts have since been deleted). For my own personal part, I was mostly convinced it was a prank, but the sheer amount of speculation (plus the confirmation of the announcement on the part of figures like SK) did give me pause at moments - and once you give pause to a particular line of thought, the prank has already succeeded. For me, the best part of this prank was the sheer scale of it - the joke itself was fine, but the best pranks are the ones that spur other incidents, like a line of dominoes, and Dark's fame ensured that this would happen. There must be only at least a dozen comics that were made in relation to this event - it overshadowed anything else that happened on the forum (heck, did anything else happen on the forum that day?). It was a defining moment in the forum, and I dread the day when Dark actually retires, if just for the scores of "O RLY?!?" posts. UPDATE: I think we've got a new one to add to this list. There's also a second component of this prank over here.

And now, the #140s: --- If one comic can sum up Ultra Matoran and Larry and Tarry's personalities, it's this one. It's amazing how the shortest comics can sometimes be the most effective. The ad at the top was appearing constantly at the top of BZPower forum pages when I made this comic, so I knew fans would know what I was referring to. Taifu started posting after being gone for a really long time, so I decided to celebrate his return. Although it seems the guest star room is starting to turn on me...a sign that I was getting bored of it? After getting my hands on a Wii, I just had to make a comic about it. So I ripped off those awesome Wii commercials, with those two guys who travel from house to house, showing everyone how flippin' awesome it is. Man, that car is horribly drawn. How I got marginally better at drawing these things I'll never know. I was in a slump when I made this comic. I wasn't making any headway on the movie, and all around I was feeling rather unmotivated. It was about this time when I also found out that I seemed to be part of a dying breed, what with all the other Razor comic makers not doing much work. A tad depressing. But like I said in the comic, it was just a generational shift. I knew there were still great comic makers on BZPower, I just wasn't making the effort to get out and discover them yet. *gasp!* Oh, the Tintin special! Oh, this was a delight! I just adored Tintin as a kid, and I knew I had to do a tribute at some point. I originally had a series in mind, but I didn't actually have a story drawn out in my mind. And instead of taking the time to come up with a story, I really wanted to get out something on the day of Tintin author Herge's birth. Of course, this comic is open-ended enough that I could have likely come up with a decent story, but I was too lazy. And anyway, I think this comic by itself works well enough as a tribute. Most of the references in this comic are pulled directly from Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, the definite Tintin stories. Ah yes...the Birth of Ultra Matoran series. This was very interesting to work on. Knowing now where this series was going, it's funny to think it started off with an Indiana Jones parody. Pontikos is the name of an actual small island somewhere off Greece (I chose it pretty much at random), though somehow I don't think it has jungles and a Mayan-style pyramid. I'm also not sure why I settled on calling the central object a vase, because it looks more like one of those double-handle cups, or a trophy of some kind. I guess the "Cup of Iktinos" didn't sound mystical enough...but at least I had Umae point it out. I also tried to work off my knowledge of art history in those panels with the ancient art. The Mesopotamia one is rather off, but I think the other two are a little more faithful. I recall this comic raised some questions about the setting of the comic series. This hadn't been much of an issue until this comic, given its numerous references to life on Earth. I think Superkid eventually came up with a good answer for how the Bionicle and Earth worlds could interact, but at the time of the comic my reaction was more along the lines of "Just go with it." For me, the comics just shift from the Bionicle world to Earth (and vice versa) as it suits the needs of the comic. And the hero is born...by the way, does that third panel remind you of the cover of Myst or what? I only just noticed that... Iktinos was in fact one of the main architects who designed the Parthenon. That's research, baby. It's funny because it's true.

Run around on it. Toss a frisbee. Sunbathe on it. Anything you'd do at a park. Speaking of memory lane: Hey, I remember you!

And now - the #130s: --- Of all the comics I've done, this is definitely one of my favorites. It's just so delightfully zany. I came up with a whole rationale of how the physics of this world would cause LR to explode if you popped his speech bubble, but this nice thing about the comic is that you really don't need to understand it. It's just weirdness for weirdness' sake. I made this comic before I found out there's actually a wiki for BZPower comics, or that some people actually took the time to write a page about me. I can't tell you how flattering that felt. The epic conclusion of the Voya Nui series, which admittedly is pretty rushed. Seems like anytime I do a series, I get halfway into it, get bored of it, and desperately try to finish it off, which I do either by not finishing it at all, or rushing the last part. I love the fifth, sixth, and seventh panels here. I really took advantage of the atmosphere the Bionicle comics captured in those shots. These were fun. At some point, I was getting really bored of guest star comics, so to spark my interest in them again I decided to make the Guest Star Room. And it worked pretty well...for a while. It was nice to have a setting and some easy repeating jokes (e.g, the plasma TV). And having a "standardized" setting made it easier to work with the bios the guest stars gave me; it allowed me to explore their characters a bit more than I would have otherwise. Eventually though I even got bored of the Guest Star Room, which was about the moment I stopped accepting guest stars. I love the eighth panel. That sinister grin with the TV knocking over the lamp is just priceless. At some point, I realized that LE wasn't sending me nearly as many stories involving Kopaka. I asked her about it, and we decided her character just wasn't that much into him anymore. So I made this comic - which just happened to fall on International Kopaka Day (less successful than Tahu day, but still a lot of fun). The classic dilemma of Snow Days. People who have to go to school love 'em, and everyone else seems to hate them for disrupting their daily routine. I'm firmly on the relaxed, "Yay no work today!" side. I have no idea which side Jphyper falls on, but he was an easy target, so... Have you noticed how common plasma TVs in public are these days? New school buildings will use them to show off pictures of campus, fast food restaurants put the menu on them - instead of, oh, I don't know, using a friggin' sign on the wall. Would probably save a few grand, but hey, what do I know? [/ranting social commentary] As for the comic itself, this has all of the hallmarks of a good guest star comic. Use of unusual guest star ability, comical use of guest star's name, and harm inflicted upon comic author. It's got it all. I live in Albuquerque, which is in the desert. It's not desert like Phoenix, it's the "high desert", which means the elevation is high, so it gets cold at night (except in the summer) and sometimes we can actually get snow in the winter. But it's still a desert, which means very little water. So you can imagine why it seems a little odd that newcomers plant lush, green lawns in front of their house and don't even use it except for decoration. [/ranting social commentary]

And now, the #120s! --- What a mess this comic is. Which is a shame, because there's some really good ideas in here. LE had the idea of doing an "alternative ending" comic, and she came up with the idea for both versions of the ending. In presenting it however, I really botched it. I should have released two separate comics, one with one ending and one with the other. In fact, I decided to fix this mistake - so, to see what should have been all along, here's the two comics: Version 1 and Version 2. Which do you prefer? This was my first comic after the Comics Forum became a separate forum for the general artwork forum, which is something a bunch of drawers, sketchers, etc. had long been clamoring for. Unfortunately, it came with a fair amount of "Comics aren't real art - you just use sprites!" attitude, which I hated beyond comprehension. I think I'll do a blog post about this at some point, but it's hard to write about without getting angry enough to smash your keyboard. Anyway, I like the thought of portraying the general artwork people as sprites - that which they seemed to most hate. Yeah, taste it you snobs. Although I wish that joke was better told now. And the idea behind VC going "Whoa, how'd I get here?!" in the first panel is that he suddenly appeared in my studio without knowing how he got there. ...Why I didn't just explain that in the comic is beyond me. Man, my comedy was off back then... I'm pretty fond of this series. I loved using the Bionicle comic backdrops for Voya Nui - it was a nifty way of marking the location and it was my way of honoring the great artist they hired for the comics that year. By stealing his work. And the characters allowed for some good jokes and a decent plot. Heck, I should have probably done more installments - but copying those backgrounds and trying to fit your sprites into them actually requires a surprising amount of work. Now Comic 125 is missing from the list, but this time I actually have an explanation for this - it was a holiday comic. And not just any holiday - it was International Tahu Day! For those who weren't there, ITD was a holiday planned in secret by a bunch of members here on the forums - one guy thought of it and PMed his friends, who PMed their friends, who PMed their friends...eventually it got to me. And boy was I excited. We changed our avatars and banners to one portraying Tahu and posted on the forum a bunch that day. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, when we tried to repeat the idea with other Toa, it started to fall apart - fewer people were interested and eventually the whole thing stopped. But it was fun while it lasted. I actually did cut the rattler off a rattlesnake once. A rattlesnake once wound up on our porch and my dad decided we had to kill it before it got to one of my little siblings or our cat. So we killed it (sad, I know), and at some point I decided I wanted to keep a souvenir from the experience, so I got a sharp knife and cut off the rattler. I still have it in a box somewhere. ...Please don't call PETA. I also wanted to show my appreciation for Leppy Razor 360 kit here. That was probably the single biggest thing to happen to the Razor kit since its creation, and it changed my comics forever. Ah, Ko-Kong. Another "What would have been..." moment for my comics. I got the idea of doing a parody of King Kong after seeing the Peter Jackson adaptation (which, despite its many flaws, was still pretty entertaining). I consulted with LE, and she had the idea of making Kong a large, beastly Kopaka (cause Kopaka likes LE, get it?). I had a great idea for the end of the series, which was based on The Producers - in order to cash in and make as much money from the opening of the Kopaka showing on Broadway, LR purposefully releases Kopaka so that the show gets crashed. I loved the idea, but sadly that was the only good idea I had for this series. And faced with the prospect of actually having to tell a story to get to that final funny scene, I couldn't bring myself to actually continue with it. So it ended here.

That would make sense, except that I've never heard the word "butte" uttered in New Mexico. Everything from a particularly prominent flat-topped hill to a huge plateau stretching for many miles winds up being called a "mesa" here. I'm not sure it's a strict classification, I think it depends on regional variation.

I would like to point out, in my defense, that I have five (five and a half, counting Kanyedora) female characters in my series, so I see this as a little offensive. Especially as Linnea did not start out as the stereotypical girlfriend; I developed the relationship over two years before actually committing to it. Fair enough - I wasn't paying much attention to the comics forum during that period, so I'll cross that example off.

Oh, finally! Man, I hate these extended forum shutdowns. And there's always a little period after the forum gets back up when people are only starting to come back, so there's fewer people around. Oh well, onward! The #110s: --- I think it's worth explaining a little history of this guy...Dark Lugia was a guest star and a big fan of the comics, who actually fed me a lot of ideas I could use for my comics (I don't think I actually wound up using many of them, but it was still a very nice gesture). He was interested in becoming a permanent guest star - well, at this point I had six permanent guest stars (seven if you count LE, but given that she was a co-author I thought of her as something more than a PGS), which was a little more than I could handle. So I told Dark Lugia I would consider it if he would help me out with the comics. So he sent me ideas. And I did seriously consider making him a PGS - and told him so - but never quite got around to it. At some point Dark Lugia stopped coming to BZPower, so it was too late... So Lugia, if you're reading, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to lead you on or anything like that. I'm just lazy. I don't really have a whole lot to say about the comic itself, just that I love the goofiness of the whole thing. The time-turner was a nice little twist. Ah yes, this comic was what started my character's fetish with Dalu. I really don't know where I got that idea, I guess I just thought it would be funny. Might as well say this now: If you're looking at that green/red dude with the gray mask and thinking "I don't remember seeing him on LR's character sheet", that is Bob, an old character of mine and one of the aforementioned six permanent guest stars. Bob's personality is that he likes candy and is insane...and that's pretty much it. He was an early fan of mine, and when he asked if he could be a PGS, I was still new to comic making so I couldn't think of any reason to say no (which is why I was more cautious later on when Dark Lugia asked). Now I regret putting Bob in - he was both in name and personality almost a complete copy of Dark709's Bob, so he was a pretty unoriginal addition to the comics. Basic rule of thumb: if your character's personality can be summed up in three words or less, you're just not creating real characters. Eventually, after Bob stopped coming to BZPower, I quietly dropped him off the character sheet along with Rahi Protector, another PGS who I accepted too quickly and had a much larger role in the movie than he ever did in the comics. I'm only throwing this one in because I love that opening line. Can't get enough of that golden crisp! Man, that commercial was annoying. I notice Comic 116 is missing from the list. I have absolutely no explanation for this. Not one. Sorry. Probably the only good thing that came out of my case of the chicken pox was this comic. And yes, it fell on my birthday...suck. I was also a big fan of Binky Island at the moment, which was a game here on BZPower that starred several old comic stars. I think Leppy (the guy who had his own awesome comics and made the Dark709 game) might have been involved in it, but don't quote me on that. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Everytime you killed one of the little bad guys on the way, they made this adorable little "Ow!" sound. It was sheer bliss. Sadly, this was the last part of the Private Eye series, simply because I could not figure out where to take the story from here. I ran into a total dead end with this one. I made part of the next episode in the series, where LE shows Private Eye LR more family pictures (including the "black sheep" of the family who had become a Nazi general - I remember that just because I wondered if I would get in trouble for depicting a Nazi swastika in a comic) and decided that LE was just being paranoid. But if I did that story it would mean this whole thing with LE had just been pointless filler, so I realized that it wouldn't make any sense. I just could not figure out where to go from here. Finally I just threw in the towel on this series. I'm not really sure what the point of this comic is. I think I started it out as a serious idea and then it just...didn't come out that way. Huh. That first panel is dialogue from the video game The Simpsons Hit & Run (again, the royalty check has yet to be sent) and the fourth panel is actually an idea I was seriously considering for a mini-series (an X-Files spoof, maybe?). And a little regional dialect - those hills with the flat tops that everyone else calls "buttes" are called "mesas" in the southwest. Not sure why I thought that was important enough to have in a comic; I guess I wrote "mesa" then realized a bunch of people wouldn't know what that is. And this is why my commentary must be so fascinating to read.

Because I love poking fun at the guy, here's Dark709 as Elvis. Originally, the line Dark says was going to be "The King is Still Alive" but then this rather unfortunate comment popped up. Dark may have stated that he wasn't bashing anyone, but the "It's about time we had another good wholesome comic series around here" line bothered me. Since when have we ever had a "wholesome" comic series on BZPower?!? Because it certainly isn't Dark's (that's not to say it's bad, but "wholesome" definitely isn't the word I would use). I dunno, maybe I'm looking too deep into this. For me it just cast a shadow over what was otherwise a very happy moment for the comics forum (by the way, go check out SUPERKID'S NEW COMICS!!!).

Eh, I think there's a male category of that as well. I had a rather alarming number of guest stars (male) who told me their character liked to beat up annoying people. But I agree that some female characters do fall into that category.

Hard to argue with that... ...sigh... Well, at least the question has been addressed (and answered to a degree). And there's plenty of comics off of BZPower to look for, to find out how the other half makes comics.

...Nah. Reason #1 is that those comics are so old, I barely even remember much about them, so I wouldn't have a whole lot to say. Reason #2 is that if I did have something to say, it would probably be along the lines of "What the %$#! was I thinking?!?" Holy cow, I didn't even think of that. Man, Jetice was years ahead of me in having a front-facing mask...

And now, the #100s: --- I started using backgrounds around this time, but for this comic it was to mock people who used the standard grass/blue sky background. Oh yeah, and overuse of Dark709 eyes (which I really should have actually used here, but for some reason didn't). In making fun of zany guest star comics, I made a zany guest star comic. The "You also haven't taken advantage of my sheet!" line is meant to make fun of some guest stars (not Toa Jetice, but others) who wanted me to use everything they gave me. Oh, the Private Eye series. Oh, what might have been... I don't actually know much film noir, just the cliches of it. I think this is the first time I extensively used backgrounds in a comic, and I'm pleased with how it came out. Some things I would improve if I was making this comic today (those bar stools make me flinch now, and the dead body needs to look more...well, dead), but for an initial foray I'm happy with it (I like those little salt and pepper shakers and that top-down view in the last panel is way ahead of its time for me). This was another genius script Jphyper sent me. My younger brother (the Nuju one I mentioned earlier, not Ben) was really into Yu-Gi-Oh at the time, and I took great delight in knowing this comic annoyed the heck out of him. This was LE's idea. I had to get braces too, so I know the pain only too well... This must be my favorite of the three Private Eye comics, just cause of that great dialogue in the alley. I also liked the idea of pulling LE into the story. That "mansion" in the seventh panel irks me today. Well, it's a start... And rounding off this set of comics, the first comic of 2006! I like the idea of a "Year in Review" comic; I should have done more... And I think this is the first (possibly only) time I mentioned Three Kakama Productions in my comics. For the record - Kakama Rahi is my favorite.

Ah. Your profile page doesn't declare your gender, so I didn't know. But more importantly, your first post seemed to be about your personal opinion regarding handdrawn and sprite comics, which at first glance didn't seem to have much to do with the subject of women in comics. And frankly, I'm still unclear how that fits into the overall discussion...are you saying that, as a female, you'd be more drawn to the comics forum if there were more handdrawn comics (or as you put it, "pretty pictures")? I feel like we're running into a Chicken and Egg scenario here. We want to entice females to the forum - but we lack the things that attract them. And without females here who know what attracts other females, females don't come. So nothing ever happens. And given that I've been making comics here for six years with little signs of improvement on this front, I'm not sure how much more patient I'm willing to be. But I acknowledge that any kind of "direct action" probably won't have any significant impact. As you rightly point out, these are larger social trends that are complex and very difficult to dictate. My initial reaction: "What th- WHaaaa?" As a guy, let me just say I totally dig the quiet chicks. But then, I'm a pretty quiet guy... But see, I feel like this has a lot to do with the common portrayal of girls in the comics forum today by male authors. I think there's still a stereotype at play here - it doesn't correspond to reality, but then stereotypes rarely do. I'm not sure how I feel about this approach. The characters we make usually reflect our feelings and experiences of the world - that's just how writing works out. Randomly picking out characteristics is difficult to manage, especially when we have no real-world experience with those characteristics - then we're in no position to be making stories based on them. Do you have a link to that, or know how to find it? I know a lot of us would be curious to check this out.

I would say a bunch of stuff about how I disagree with your views, but I'm not sure how this post even fits into this topic...this seems to be much more of an Artwork I vs. Artwork III post, which I will probably do a blog post about at some point (it does play a role in our views of the comics forum), just not now. Do you have anything to say about the subject at hand? We don't just shrug it off - we just pretend to. Then we weep softly in a quiet room, away from the judgmental glares of our peers. High five!