January 04, 2005
storytime
There's a new Storytime entry up this morning -- Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. It's taken me eight years to draw this one strip. I've been busy.
Back in '96 or '97, I was going to start putting my comic strips up online but never got around to doing it until much, much later. This was, of course, a stupid move on my part. PE(aott) could've been one of the first comic strips online, it would probably have Sluggy Freelance-like readership numbers, and I wouldn't have had to go through that whole Wikipedia mess. Back then, a co-worker had hart.org as a domain. He offered me a subdomain for my web stuff. So then I was the guy behind tell-tale.hart.org. One of the first things I was to put on the site was a Carol Lay Story Minute-inspired version of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. This idea was partially sketched out, then abandoned.
Years later, I doodled up the Hamlet Storytime entry as a filler strip for PE(aott). This was shifted over to Storytime and two other Poe stories followed -- The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Cask of Amontillado. Yet no The Tell-Tale Heart. Finally, a few months ago, I discovered that years-old sketch of my first treatment. The second treatment added four more panels and simplified the story even more. However, the inking was horrible, and the half-inked strip was abandoned.
Last night I picked it up and redrew the whole thing. From the first pencil mark to the last bit of inking, it took about ninety minutes to complete, but that's because I was watching Family Guy while drawing.
But there we are. A new Storytime -- the first, really -- conceptualized during the early part of Bill Clinton's second term in office, completed just before George W. Bush's first term ended. Whew.
Posted at January 4, 2005 10:23 AM
There's a new Storytime entry up this morning -- Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. It's taken me eight years to draw this one strip. I've been busy.
Back in '96 or '97, I was going to start putting my comic strips up online but never got around to doing it until much, much later. This was, of course, a stupid move on my part. PE(aott) could've been one of the first comic strips online, it would probably have Sluggy Freelance-like readership numbers, and I wouldn't have had to go through that whole Wikipedia mess. Back then, a co-worker had hart.org as a domain. He offered me a subdomain for my web stuff. So then I was the guy behind tell-tale.hart.org. One of the first things I was to put on the site was a Carol Lay Story Minute-inspired version of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. This idea was partially sketched out, then abandoned.
Years later, I doodled up the Hamlet Storytime entry as a filler strip for PE(aott). This was shifted over to Storytime and two other Poe stories followed -- The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Cask of Amontillado. Yet no The Tell-Tale Heart. Finally, a few months ago, I discovered that years-old sketch of my first treatment. The second treatment added four more panels and simplified the story even more. However, the inking was horrible, and the half-inked strip was abandoned.
Last night I picked it up and redrew the whole thing. From the first pencil mark to the last bit of inking, it took about ninety minutes to complete, but that's because I was watching Family Guy while drawing.
But there we are. A new Storytime -- the first, really -- conceptualized during the early part of Bill Clinton's second term in office, completed just before George W. Bush's first term ended. Whew.
Posted at January 4, 2005 10:23 AM