Welcome to A 1000 Days Like This, heavily inspired by my liking for romantic comedies such as Maison Ikkoku and Kimagure Orange Road. In the past, I've tried my hand at adventures and daily gags both, and neither has panned out for me. My adventures are too lengthy for a single-page format, and my daily gags suck. I'm not a funny person on the spot. Given time to think and conceive of a joke, I can be mildly amusing, but you wouldn't want me to be the life of the party otherwise.

In the past, I've worried about making many comics, making clean comics, making comics that look like Leonardo Da Vinci illustrated them. Then I read some very good advice by Dik Browne, creator of Hagar the Horrible: "A comic should look like a human being drew it, not a machine". That put any preconceptions I had about my art to rest. Al Capp, creator of L'il Abner was also famous for his ideology that comics should be well written, even if they're not well drawn, never the other way around. Bill Watterson held similar ideals, and so on.

I'm not a good cartoonist and I'm not ignorant enough to assume my work can even touch that of the aforementioned cartoonists. However, they are some of the few I look up to in the industry, and that's why I credit them for inspiring me. Doonsbury and For Better or For Worse didn't start off as being well drawn, but they eventually became two of the most adventurous comics in the newspapers, both artistically and literally. Kristofer Straub, who writes and draws the online webcomic Checkerboard Nightmare, is also an influence. His sense of humour isn't found many other places on the web, for two reasons. One, Checkerboard Nightmare is neither a reality comic (re: Real Life, Mac Hall), nor a gaming comic (8-Bit Theatre, Penny Arcade). It's satire, pure and simple, and done in a way that pokes fun at everything contemporary. Most revered comics (Doonsbury for example) are similar.

My aim with A 1000 Days Like This isn't to create a comic with longevity. In all reality, it's going to run the timeline and then end. If I feel the comic was worthwhile and people want to see more (and I'm willing to create it), I'll write a sequel, or another, similar story. I'm not Rumiko Takahashi (the richest woman in Japan and a revered comic artist) who can belt out one adventure after another to the same audience across many series', but I can try. I hope you, the readers, enjoy the comic and follow its life. A thousand days can be quite a long time in the comics, after all.

Monday, September 08, 2003 # posted by <$BlogCommentAuthor$> : <$BlogCommentDateTime$> <$BlogCommentDeleteIcon$> | Archived Commentaries