How I Became a Webcomic Artist

I don't know if I've gone more than a day or two without reading comics since the turn of the millennium.

Best I can recall, I was first introduced to comics by my cousin when he brought a couple Garfield books on one of our annual camping trips. It was either that or Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants novels, which feature hand-drawn comics by the main characters, George and Harold. Either way, I was indoctrinated at a young age, and it has proved to be a real problem for my wallet ever since.

(Not pictured: the other eighty percent.)

Now, we could spend all day talking about my relationship with comics. There are some interesting stories to tell on that front, actually. I could go on about the Great Manga Dive of 2007, The Walking Dead Binge of 2010, and the Emerald City Comic Con Questionable Decisions of every year from 2012 to 2019 (and hopefully 2021, COVID vaccinations permitting). But today we're going to stick with a particular subset of comics that cost me very little money--but far more time--than those other stories.

During high school, I discovered webcomics.

Actually, that's not entirely true. Technically, my first foray into webcomics was in middle school via Funbrain, a family-friendly website that students were allowed to browse when we finished our  computer lab projects. Back then, the site hosted Wally and Osborne, a gag strip about a polar bear and a penguin.

The artist, Tyler Martin, is still making new strips, albeit at a much slower pace. Check him out!

Fun fact: this site also hosted a couple other stories I read, including the first Camp Confidential chapter book by Melisa J. Morgan and an illustrated journal called Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney, which was eventually printed in 2007. Maybe you've heard of it.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid actually inspired me to take my first stab at autobiographical writing thanks to its illustrated nature. I filled three faux-Moleskine journals with my daily musings, which got progressively sloppier as I tried to fill space quicker to seem more productive to myself. Eventually, I fell out of the habit and hid the journals under my bunk bed. Then they disappeared, and I really hope they just got recycled and weren't rescued by my mom to whip out at my wedding or something.

Anyways.

In high school, I discovered Recon Dye's Pokemon-X, which is credited as the first Pokemon sprite webcomic and came out almost a decade before Pokemon X was also the name of a real game. It's currently sitting at over 1,100 pages, though it hasn't posted a new one since June 2020. 

Obligatory link to this piece of history.

Thanks to an ad on the Pokemon-X site, I discovered a webcomic ranking page that opened me up to the world of webcomics. Like many people first discovering a new hobby, I went a bit overboard. I ended up subscribing to dozens of comics that I couldn't reasonably stay caught up on. My favorites included Travis Hanson's The Bean, Sarah Schanze's Thistl Mistl Kistl, Ursula Vernon's Digger, and Tom Fischbach's Twokinds, which confused me stylistically for years until I learned about Furries.

(The answer is "no", by the way.)

But of all the myriad comics available to me in the vastness of the internet, my favorite subgenre was the burgeoning Nuzlocke challenge community. The Nuzlocke challenge, if you're unfamiliar, is when you play a Pokemon game using two self-imposed rules to increase the difficulty:

1. You may only catch one Pokemon in each area of the game, and it must be the first one you encounter.
2. If a Pokemon faints in battle, it is considered dead and must never be used again.

There are plenty of optional rules as well (no items in battle, required nicknames for all Pokemon, etc.), but those are implemented at the discretion of the individual player.

Many people who play Nuzlockes chronicle their games via prose, gameplay videos, or webcomics, which is how I first got involved. My favorite runs were hosted on SmackJeeves, a free webcomic site that suffered a cruel and heartless death at the end of 2020--you know, that year that almost destroyed everything?

The queen of Nuzlocke comics, in my opinion, was a woman by the name of PettyArtist: 

Click here to show her some love on DeviantArt!

Her run is arguably the most popular Nuzlocke comic outside the original run by Nick Franco. It not only sparked my interest in the Nuzlocke challenge itself, but provided me new artistic inspiration.

It's worth noting at this point that for almost as long as I've been reading comics, I've been drawing them as well. Because most of the originals are at my parents' house, I have hastily recreated a few of my most prolific characters from memory:

From left to right, top to bottom:

• Monty Dawg, from a gag-a-day strip about neighborhood animals that eventually got sidelined when I decided they should all be part of a nu metal band. From that point on, I just developed fake album covers, titles, and song names/lengths for their band, the Animontys. The only album name I recall is Hold It 'Cause It's Cold, and I actively hate myself a little more each time I remember that.
• Microboy, Defender of the Inchians. He is three-and-a-half inches tall and mostly fights his arch nemesis, the Gruesome Grapevine, which started as an angry fruit lizard and eventually became a shapeshifter that could transform into a dragon and also a Roswellian alien? Microboy used toothpicks for swords.
• Keddi, a young Ticoblin warrior. The Ticoblins (named after the forehead tic each one sports for no discernable reason) were more civilized descendants of traditional goblins, which developed numerous cultures not unlike the four nations of Avatar: The Last Airbender. This series also got some serious out-of-comic development in the form of copious cultural notes in my eighth-grade school agenda.
• The logo for Laffing Pensil Comix, Inc., my childhood comic imprint. I still don't really know what being incorporated means, but it sounded good. This logo predates all the other drawings, being originally featured on the back cover of my first comic, The Bathroom Boys (a blatant Captain Underpants rip-off from my earliest days of cartooning). In elementary school, I even signed a couple classmates to the imprint, but nothing materialized and their contracts are likely void (and were almost certainly printed in Comic Sans).

I worked on numerous other comic ideas over the years, many of which never made it past the first round of character designs. As I kept trying new things, my style naturally evolved. The jump from first-go line art to sketching revolutionized my work, and my introduction to manga in middle school significantly altered the facial features of many of my characters. Eventually, I started comicking less and doodling more, resulting in less need for a unified style. For years now, my default doodle style has fallen somewhere between Jhonen Vasquez (Invader Zim) and Mike Shinoda, better known for his music with Linkin Park than his graphic art. However, depending on what I need to convey, I will pull generously from the toolkits of some of my other favorite artists, including Jeff Lemire, David Willis, and Kazu Kibuishi.

But Petty's art did something different for me. Her rounded lines and simple digital shading (her comic was black and white in its early days) weren't just visually pleasing. They were artistically accessible. And accessibility was very important for the quest I was about to embark on.

In the latter half of 2011, I went on vacation with my family in California. We've been down there numerous times, sometimes staying with my aunts and uncles and sometimes renting a place for the whole clan to gather. I don't remember which trip this was exactly--though, now that I think about it, it may be the same trip I went on during "Bent Syringes and Mustard Water", a blog post from a bygone era that, if you didn't read while it was public, you will never get to read.

Here's an image from that lost post, with no additional context:

You're welcome.

When I went on Whichever Trip This Was, I brought with me a copy of Pokemon Emerald and a Game Boy Micro. For anyone who isn't aware, the Game Boy Micro looks like this:

Sometimes.

The faceplate is actually removeable, and a number of other designs were released. My preferred cover is a radical orange design that looks like someone dipped it in a Windows music visualizer:

The Game Boy Micro is the last entry in the Game Boy family, retaining upgrades like the Game Boy Advance SP's backlight while further compressing the design into something that can disappear into just about any pocket. But what I find most interesting about it is its release date: September 2005, ten months after the Nintendo DS, which was already capable of playing every Game Boy Advance game as well as an entire new generation of dual-screen titles. So for the last fifteen years, I've been asking myself: who was this thing made for?

Apparently, a lot more of us than I anticipated. But still, compared to the 40+ million SPs out there, it's a bit of an oddity.

I still use it, by the way. I even took it to Austin, Texas when I volunteered at RTX in 2017, and it was perfect for playing quick matches of Yu-Gi-Oh! during my down time.

But, anyways. I'm guessing you can figure out where this is going: I decided to make a Nuzlocke comic of my own.

And I was going to do it my way.

The hard way.

You see, Nuzlocke comics aren't uniform, but many of them (including Petty's and Nick Franco's) share a specific type of formatting: long, scrolling pages containing sometimes dozens of panels, with each page covering a substantial amount of the story in order to tell the full story in a short-ish number of updates.

This is not what I was used to. I was used to newspaper comic strips, or manga, or webcomics that effectively read like "normal" graphic novels. This was how I made comics for fun in elementary school, and this was how I wanted to make my Nuzlocke comic. My choice of graphic novel-style presentation, coupled with my penchant for world-building and small character moments, meant this was going to be an ambitious undertaking.

In order to prepare for the comic, I kept a Word document open the whole time I played the game, which made the process take several months, instead of just days or weeks like my other Pokemon playthroughs. I took notes of everything--every item I found, every trainer I fought, when and where every Pokemon leveled up.

Here's an example log of just one battle:

I ended up with 177 pages of notes.

Some Nuzlocke players start publicly chronicling their adventures early in their run, updating their comic in almost real time. I realized this wouldn't work for how I wanted to tell my story, so I didn't even begin drawing the prologue until I was somewhere around the seventh of eight Pokemon Gyms. This allowed me to give my comic more structure than some other Nuzlockes. I could foreshadow events, or have characters' personalities start more fleshed out thanks to the ample lead time I got to spend with each Pokemon. I ended up using relatively little of my notes--probably only about a fifth of what I wrote down--but having them so thorough was instrumental in developing my comic's storytelling style.

I hand-drew the first few pages before deciding it looked too messy--I prefer drawing with pencils, but because I'm left-handed I end up dragging large amounts of lead across the page as I tell a story from left to right. Plus, I was using printer paper and a basic home scanner, so I wasn't exactly getting professional results. 

So, after a few test pages, I decided to switch to digital drawing for the first time. I had originally purchased a basic Wacom tablet for this project, but disliked the distance between where I was drawing and where I saw the results. It didn't feel intimate enough. Instead, I ended up using my dad's old Toshiba Portege M400, a notebook laptop circa 2005 which looks something like this (just add a large Coke decal):

You may notice that it seems like someone broke the poor thing's neck. This is because the touchscreen actually swivels on a central point and folds over the keyboard, instead of folding all the way open like modern notebook laptops. The touchscreen only responds to its stylus, meaning I could drag my hand across the screen without affecting anything. Furthermore, its screen isn't true glass, and has a level of give to it that feels almost like drawing on paper.

Unfortunately, my specific also M400 had no internet access, a faulty monitor connection, a severe overheating problem, no battery (literally no battery, we removed it because it was somehow interfering with the aforementioned monitor connection), and it weighed as much as a medium child. This sucker was an absolute bear to use.

Jack White once said that he believed the constraints of the White Stripes made for more creative work, and that he would intentionally make things harder on himself to stay energized and inspired. I like to think I believe this for myself, but what's more likely is that I just develop Stockholm Syndrome with my personal cages. After all, if I accept my limitations, I never have to learn anything else or improve myself.

So not only did I decide I was going to draw the entire comic using this outdated, sputtering machine, I also decided I was only going to use five colors: black, white, light grey, dark grey, and a custom grey reserved for death scenes.

But the biggest handicap? I was going to only use Microsoft Paint, because I am a glutton for punishment, and also nothing else would install.

I recreated the test pages quickly, after spending an exorbitant amount of time converting 8.5 x 11 inches into pixels based on the M400's resolution, ostensibly to keep in touch with the comic's humble printer paper origins but really because I'm addicted to consistency. Once I had built up a small buffer of pages, it was time to go live.

On February 1, 2012, the above page was posted to SmackJeeves, along with the rest of the prologue, and I was officially a webcomic artist.

What happened next is a long story.