7/25/2001:

Did I scare you? To be honest, I did warn that this might happen. (The sticky figures). Here's why it's going to be OK: this frees me from just writing crap down over pretty static strips. Now that our characters are free to move... well, watch out! Reason for OK #2 is that this is how I write the strips, actually. In my notebooks, I scrawl out ideas. Again for those who didn't read carefully, Sil's got the X.

So here's a brief history of Kip's drawing career. When I was very young, I remember drawing on my dad's Mac SE using MacPaint. My favorite tool was the FatBits pencil. You could double click and then put the pixels in, one by one. I wasn't very good with the other tools, because I was (still am) a lefty. I used to draw ninjas and landscapes with ninjas. Then I moved to before and after pictures of kids forced to practice the violin and piano for too long, resulting in an unholy confluence of man and instrument. Yes, even then I was using art to express my feelings. Of course, I was also using yelling to express my feelings.

In church, I would doodle. I had one doodle called the Avenging Smiley who became my hero of choice to fight off the bad ninjas invading the margins of my mother's church bulletins. He was a blundering superhero, based on Darkwing Duck and other bumblers. He also had a badass supersidekick named PowerFrog who would bail him out.

Smiley jumped off the bulletins and onto my schoolwork once I hit middle school. We had to carry around these huge binders full of our papers and notebooks. Smiley would battle ninjas on my dividers and the backs of notebooks. It was in middle school that I thought I was pretty good. I drew 2 Smiley comic books. One was terrible. The other one was merely awful. My problems were mainly due to lack of patience. I wanted those stories out and onto paper and I couldn't be bothered to spend time on a panel once I thought the point had been made.

Another problem was that I was telling these stories for myself. I even tried to write Smiley short stories. But my English teacher said, "There's just so much going on here that we don't know about." I told her that it made perfect sense to me, but I still got a bad grade on that paper. I think Smiley's magic didn't really come across between the lines.

Another guy in my class, Ryan, was also drawing comic characters. His looked much better, because he'd been to drawing classes where they taught how to draw with perspective and shading. I just sorta put lines wherever (this was explained away by Smiley's superpowers, which were to stretch and deform). Ryan's superhero (a turtle with heavy artillery) and Smiley had one great crossover adventure. We beat up on another guy's Springman, who was just a bunch of scribble.

Smiley stopped being drawn so much in high school, as I took notes rarely. Smiley really faded in college because I fall asleep in class too much. My notes start out straight and then curve downwards as consciousness ebbs.

When Scrubs started, I always drew out the strips as stick figures. Then I'd give them to Sil. I tried writing them out in prose form and that works well too, epsecially for email transfer. I find that my writing adjusts depending on how the strip was originally laid down.

So... do you like it? Hate it? Will you stop reading? Only time and web logs will tell. I do promise that it won't be stick figures forever. If you do have comments, fire them here.

-kip