It feels really good to see this one finished and posted. I almost threw in the towel on this one.

Last week I sat down to finish this one up (I had finished the basics of the first panel earlier) as the start of my big day of creating a buffer of comics. My plan for five comics instead turned into a race against the clock (the clock being when my body would give out) as I suddenly felt really sick. So instead of five wonderful strips, I instead put together that fever-dream I vomited onto the interwebs last week.

Since then there have been responsibilities and happenings in my everyday that just kept me from Internet. Finishing the strip, it seemed like every time I sat down to finish it up, I’d remember a commitment or responsibility I had forgotten about. So flash forward to today, sitting down and putting this strip together, I finish the first panel, touch it up, fix some mistakes and proceed to the second panel.  After some formatting issues and a few different incarnations I finish the second panel, and feel proud of myself. Sitting back I think that it would be a great time to save after having finished that long road, a victory save if you will.

So as my slow-as-sludge computer is saving this strip one of my cats, Figment, pulls the computer’s plug out of the wall. Just straight up yanks it out of the wall. I scream and make vague threats at the cat and boot the computer back up to find that the strip didn’t save in time, and I’m back to zero on the second panel, I’d lost about 85% of the days work.

Right then I think “I’m done, that’s it, I can’t do it.” Not only am I quitting cartooning, I’m quitting computers, chairs, desks and every thing else involved. Chris comes in and promises me ice cream if I come back, but I’ve heard that one before. I call my brother Josh and his first question is if I got Freakazoid like powers from the ordeal, and I tell him that I checked, but all I got was a wasted morning.

I decided momentarily to chuck this weeks strip all together and instead start a strip about how much I hate my cat. It was essentially shaping up to be a smear campaign about how my cat says he’s tough on crime but in fact is on the take, how he once ate food meant for orphans and then used his political clout to try to legalize catnip.

But realizing that my cat is oblivious to being slandered on the Internet, and that essentially it was turning out to be a really mean-spirited mix between Garfield and Fox News, I decided to shelve that, for now.

But with that lingering promise of ice cream (which by the way, never came to fruition, you owe me a trip to Cold Stone Chris!) and a personal promise to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark if I finished, I managed to not only finish the strip, but meet some own personal goals in what I wanted to do as well. 

So here you go imaginary Internet public, our football strip. Out of all our Ominous Knife comics so far, I think this is the only one that came out of an actual conversation we’ve had one too many times. Also, I had to wikipedia Peyton Manning to even figure out if he was a player, a coach, an announcer or whatever, which is in some ways the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done.

-Kevin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:53 am and is filed under News Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.