Archive for January, 2010
9 items.
Change of Heart
I decided I wasn’t happy with Friday’s offering. Here is a strip I worked very hard on, that Liz and Alex helped me write. It is much more awesome and more in keeping with the proper tone for the comic.
Sometimes I write things and don’t think about them. I hope you like this better. The other strip has been lost to the void.
I won’t let it happen again, I promise! haha
Regular News
Sasquatch is and always has been a stud. Unfortunately, all of us have our moments where we are caught off guard by photographers. Sasquatch’s moment happened in 1967.
That isn’t just some arbitrary date I pulled out of thin air, that’s the date Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin allegedly filmed the mighty Bigfoot, a frame of which has been used as the punchline here in the strip.
I’ve always been fascinated by cryptids, that is, creatures unknown to science. Of course, I don’t believe many of them are real but it’s fun to fantasize about their existence. Thunderbirds, Sasquatch, the Kraken, they’ve all got great names and such interesting histories with strong roots in traditional folklore.
Of them all, Sasquatch is clearly my favourite.
School has begun again recently and it has already put a damper on my mood. I like some classes but all I want to do is draw comics and work hard to make things people will enjoy. Bleh!
I wanted to say thanks so much to everyone who has sent an email about the shirts. I have decided to go ahead and get a bunch printed up.
I’m so fortunate to have people that really enjoy what I do. Your comments, emails, and willingness to support me by buying a shirt means a lot to me, as sappy as that may sound. I’m a poor college student and my dream has always been to make some kind of living making comics and it seems like I’m finally getting to that point.
So thanks, I really appreciate it <3
Here is the shirt design again, if you'd like one please email me with the subject line "I'd like a t-shirt". We've found a place and I think we'll send the design out for printing this week! The URL WILL be across the shoulders on the back. The price will likely be 16 dollars as a result.
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The image below is, indeed, the first T-shirt design idea for Happle Tea. I’m wondering how many people would be interested in purchasing one. I am thinking I will sell them for about 15 dollars each. If you think you would like to order one, please email me (k@10km.org) with the subject “I’d like a t-shirt“.
This isn’t a binding contract or a pre-order, just an idea to see if I should bother printing shirts right now.
PS- To clear up some questions: The grey would be whatever the shirt colour is, I haven’t decided yet what colour to go with for the first round of printing but I’m looking at different places. Also, the URL is (hopefully) not going to be right there. I want it to be on the back between the shoulder blades, but I have to see if that costs extra. I will keep you updated. Thanks to everyone who’s sent an email so far! 
The design as it would (hopefully) appear on a shirt. Do people like brown? I think it would either be a darkish brown or a grey, those seem to look best with this design.
Regular News
I have painted, for you, a vision of the future. Lizards with lasers. Talking dinosaurs. A boy who destroys the space time continuum with a crayon up his nose.
This is the first of a series of strips about Benjamin Franklin Rex and Future K. If you missed their first appearance, point yourself this way.
I’ll probably parcel out these bits of story randomly. It was pretty fun to work on and certainly a different process. I hope you enjoy it.
Mythological madness continues on Friday!
It’s been some time since the original dire owl strip. As soon as I’d produced the first one, I knew I had comic gold in the form of an owl in a top hat and wanted to do more. Unfortunately, I don’t like to use any one character too much (except our hero, Lil K) and I wanted to make sure if Dire Owls made a return to center stage, I’d do them justice. Thankfully, with the panel restrictions removed, I was able to produce something I am proud of, something I am sure the Dire Owls won’t murder me for.
Oh yes, they’re real and if you speak ill of them, they will destroy you.
For those that maybe missed or skipped the original dire owl strip, feel free to acquaint yourself with it.
Please check this out, my brother got a stuffed owl and decked him out. I know the picture is fuzzy but you get the idea. It’s awesome.
I know this comic features a lot of owls, its safe to say that they’re one of my favourite animals and they have been for a very long time. I have an owl hoodie that Liz made me, as well as a calendar that she gave me featuring an owl for every month. There is also a plaque that my brother turned into a dire owl that hangs in the hallway at my apartment to greet anyone entering with menace and scorn. They are my favourite thing. They are also an animal I consider to be fairly untapped as a comic resource. They may be incredible predators that represent wisdom and strength to many cultures, but they are also totally ridiculous looking.
Anyway, here’s another of those weird strips where K is very…different. I guess murderous is the word but that’s a bit strong. Does this child have multiple personality disorder or something? Or maybe, like most kids, he is just given to doing things on a whim. Most kids, thankfully, do not have access to owl-assassins.
Trolls and their ilk are a troublesome lot. They ruin international efforts in infrastructure management, they are mean spirited, and worst of all, they smell awful. “But Scott,” you ask (and rightly so), “what are we to do about this problem? You, who are so wise in the ways of monsters should know!” Well I’ve got a few words for you!
I have no goddamn idea. They live under bridges, how do we even begin to get them out of there? They can hold out there forever, or need I remind you, they are trolls.
In all seriousness, trolls are rather interesting creatures to read about. Products of Norse Mythology, (as so many well known monsters and creatures are) they have been depicted as horrible monsters as well as mere interesting oddities. They have also made their way into role-playing games as a staple monster for adventurers to destroy. You know you’ve made it as a monster when you appear in the D&D Monster Manual.
There is some new fan-art up in the fan-art section! There is some artwork from Liz featuring our gnome friends from last comic and a comic I completely forgot to mention (like an idiot) by Chris S. Check them out!
Misnomers are funny things. I’m not entirely sure the word “grounded” qualifies, but I’m certain some english major will correct me if I’m wrong. Either way, it was too good to pass up as a strip title.
Gnomes, in classic mythology, are typically depicted as not being especially friendly. They are akin to dwarves in that they are greedy, ground dwelling earth spirits that know metal and treasure in ways humans rarely seem to understand. The gnomes we know and love today were primarily developed by writers in the 18th and 19th centuries as characters in fairy tales. Up until that point, it appears as though gnomes and dwarves were, more or less, the same thing. Since then, they’ve been used in fantasy literature in a variety of interesting ways. My favourite iteration has to be The Nac Mac Feegle as depicted in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men. While not referred to as gnomes, they certainly are a version of the idea and they’re absolutely hilarious.
Whew! Gnome rant!
I believe this is comic #75 of Happle Tea! We’re quickly closing in on 100 strips, how exciting!
Honestly, I am waiting for a time when we replace all religion and mythology with a pantheon of internet memes. At the forefront, Pedobear, chief among the meme-deities, followed closely by the “I can break these Cuffs!” guy, then Rick Astley, and so on. I guess if you were to come up with mytho-religious analogies, Pedobear would be Zeus/God, “I Can Break These Cuffs!” would be your Poseidon, and Rick Astley would just be a sort of divine Rick Astley.
Fair warning: I am considering doing more of these things.
Class, your lesson for today is on both Memes and the story of Fenrir.
If you’ve never seen the “I can Break These Cuffs” clip, I highly urge you to watch it. There is even a sweet remix which Sweet William and I have been known to play on guitar.
I didn’t manage to get any shirt designs done over the weekand but I did manage to get two pages of a short 8 page comic done! This comic is going to be featured in a small booklet of short comics by William and I which we’ll probably be selling at conventions and maybe over the internets if there is demand for it. I figured I would show you the first page, since you guys and girls are so awesome.
Sometimes people are a bit reactionary when it comes to things they dislike. Some of us are slightly more reactionary than others. Maybe we should all have a day where we just throw each other through trees. The world might be a better place, albeit more bruised and with some broken bones I suspect.
I’ve made some jokes about Harry Potter in the past. I’ve also shown Lil K as having an irrational fear of witches. Truth be told, neither of these things is true of me. I’ve had some comments and some emails about these subjects and I just wanted to clear the air. I don’t hate Harry Potter or witches.
I hate magic.
Just kidding.
The discontinuation of the three panel format continues! Personally, I’ve really enjoyed working on these last couple of strips. Now, obviously, there is a certain level of enjoyment with all of the strips, but it feels a lot more natural to be able to work in a non-standardized format. Hooray!
I hope to have a t-shirt design to show you all next tuesday. Hopefully you can give me your feedback and let me know what you think!
Inexplicable bouts of sleeping for 20+ years don’t happen everyday but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t. Sleeping pills are a recipe for disaster of the Rip Van Winkle variety.
Rip Van Winkle proved to us that we really should be careful about lying down for a quick nap after ingesting substances we don’t fully understand. I think that was the message…
Actually, the story of Rip Van Winkle, at first, seems to be a tale about idleness. It is interesting to say the least, but I always thought it a little strange considering the protagonist never really progresses. He’s lazy and harassed by a nagging wife, goes off into the woods one day, drinks some ghost-liquor, falls asleep for 20 years to find out most everyone he loved is gone or dead, and then goes right back to being lazy but less stressed thanks to the loss of his nagging wife. If you look at the character arc it seems like Irving is saying, “If you’re lazy and your life sucks, just be even more lazy and everything will sort itself out!”
What Irving is really talking about is the nature of progress and how the present is built on the foundations of the past. It’s really about connections between the past, present, and future and it’s not really about what specifically happens to Van Winkle at all which is a pretty strange thing in popular literature. Most writing focuses on character progression for the basis of themes and only uses the setting and supporting characters as fodder for secondary themes.
Personally, I find that Washington Irving has a nice cadence to his writing and this is a good and easy story to read to get to know his work.
It’s funny sometimes, how much I think about these myths and stories that we all vaguely know and then the sorts of comics that come out of them.
Also you may notice there are six panels today instead of the usual 3. My New Year’s Resolution (not really) for 2010 is to draw and write comics that work and make me happy. Rather than pigeon-hole myself into working within a very limiting 3 vertical panels for no real reason, I am branching out and using however many panels and whatever shaped panels I feel works best to deliver the proper pacing and feel for a particular idea. Will I do 20 panels in a single update? Unlikely. Will we see far fewer three panel strips? Absolutely.
I’ve always felt like I was trying to cram too much into those three panels over the last few months. It was a good experiment and difficult to do, but I think some of those ideas would have been much better served with some breathing room and proper pacing. Plus, it’s really fun to be able to play around with composition in different panel shapes!
Anyway, I hope you like it, it was a lot more fun to work on this than it has been to do strips in the past!
Oh yeah, you might see some weird things happening on the site over the next few days. I’m going to try to add a secondary navigation bar above the comic so that you can easily skip over larger comics that you’ve seen before.
Happle New Year, evr’ybody! Here’s to 2010!
I just want to say thank you to everybody who visits the site and helps support the comic by checking back, telling friends, and advertising on forums and blogs.
Thanks to all of you, I have not toiled in obscurity the way most webcomics do in their first year. It has been a busy six months of work but you have all made it worthwhile with your comments, kind words, emails, and support.
Have great year, all of you <3