I publicly released my first comic on the 8th of December, 2006. On that day, I released 7 comics, untitled, but of one paradigm. These were my first comics, and the intention was for them to be poorly drawn, but with emphasis on the dialog. I continued drawing these comics the 11th of January, after releasing 28 of them. I stopped, because I realized they were terrible. The jokes were, at best, juvenile, and the pictures were still the same. I decided, I was going to draw better ones.
On the 23rd of January, I released my first comic of a new paradigm, titled Lisp. It was badly drawn, but it didn't involve the characters from my first one. Along with Lisp, I released Vector Math Is Funny? which was a huge departure from my original ideas. I drew a few with new ideas in mind, some funny, some quite dry, and probably a few that were just unfunny. It was ok, because I was experimenting with a new idea. These are the comics I am most proud of.
In August of 2007, I decided to do a regularly syndicated comic, with new ones added every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. This is where the story gets bad. I start writing comics like crazy and I, for the most part, release them regularly. They get complicated, and I start to enjoy drawing them. But...After awhile, they start to look like my old ones. The characters become badly drawn and the jokes got more and more juvenile. Trite is the word that I would use to describe them now. Inspiration becomes harder and harder to come by and I start to question whether it's worth continuing to draw them.
I've decided that it is not. I've always wanted to be syndicated by some external source, or even to have a legitimate website for myself to show off these creations, but as time progressed, I began to think that they weren't good enough. This last two weeks or so of comics have proven to me that they're not. Since September, my overall readership has dropped near 25% and now, I'm lucky to have four hits per new comic. Sure, on deviantart I have a small (very small) following, but it's quite irrelevant to me. I've returned to the comics that I stopped drawing. Stick figures, explosions, and overall non-sequiterness has began to dominate my comics. My drafts are more and more of the same. I've drawn over 15 comics in the last week, not one I deem funny. The ones I'm choosing for my releases are ones I find the least unfunny.
If I one day learn to actually draw and to actually write jokes, I might start up again. At the same time, I just watched my comics go from shit, to semi-excellent, to shit again – a pattern that I'm not particularly proud of. I will continue to write comics and jokes, but they'll remain in my notebook until I convince myself that they should go elsewhere. To the six of you who will see this comic, I apologize, but really, there are better webcomics out there. Just go there, they're funnier, and more well draw, and clever, no point in me pushing my crap.
I'm now also retroactively releasing all my comics on this blog (but not the 28 I drew from December to January) under the Creative Commons license (by-nc-sa). Maybe someone else will have a better idea on what to do with them.
So, without further adieu, here's my final comic:
