My own comics
When I started this new incarnation of the Random Number back in March 2009, one of the first things I did was upload some comic strips I had published in the old version of the blog, though I didn’t make them available for the public at the time. I had done various illustrations, and a rather cool series (if I may say so myself) called Extra-Caffeine, that lampooned myself and some of the other contributors of the sadly defunct Cafeína blog. My favourite, and vastly more popular than Extra-Caffeine, was the Syndicate of Super Heroes.
Left to right: Multi-Man, Pants Man, The Atomic Fly, Flea-Man, Mavorotheras and Captain Unbelievable
The 49 strips I published must’ve generated more views and comments than the other thousand posts put together. While Extra-Caffeine was rife with in-jokes, personal idiosyncrasies, and somewhat blatantly aimed at the circle of friends it depicted, SSH had a much more broader appeal, as its jokes stemmed from taking the mick out of mainstream American super-hero culture. The characters were basically all the members of Extra-Caffeine in a costume, and I used their personal traits to breathe a bit of colour and verisimilitude into their comic counterparts.
And the best thing was that I loved it. I loved doing them, and I loved putting them up on the blog. Most of my work in cartoon strips that I showed to people then led to pressure and pathetic suggestions, which I’d regrettably follow every now and then. Super-heroes are a theme that most people I know aren’t very familiar with, at least not to a point that’ll start them giving silly ideas for future strips. The result was a nag-free stint doing whatever the hell I felt, and a lot of personal satisfaction with the end product.
Yesterday night, nostalgia kicked in, and I sat down and began pencilling a new strip, the 50th instalment in the series. And it dawned on me that I should re-publish the 49 original strips here, since after the old blog went belly up, I had no consistent archive for my own personal consultation. When originally published, the comic strips had to be carved up into smaller images, because the server they were uploaded to had a 500-pixel width and 64kb per image limit. If I want to re-read the strips, I have to delve through them half a strip at a time, which is very irksome. This is also why I didn’t exhibit the original strips when I uploaded them here. They’re a bit grainy and crappy, and the template I have on this blog gives an unwanted space between each picture. So I’ll have to find the time to redo those images in a more complete form with higher quality, and make use of Web 2.0 potential. With any luck I’ll do this soon, and I’ll have forty-nine guaranteed posts of what at least I deem to be good quality.
