Year One

boo..

2005-05-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

Nothing about the comic but ive just been reading about Nintendos E3 press conference. Sigh - no Revolution info (not really) - Actually last nght i quickly whipped upa comic - wanted it to be up before E3 but i times it poorly.Will go up today - looks really bad though - hand lettered and stuff - did it really quick.
BUt yeah - other stuff looks cool and all but if this is sposed to be released alongside the PS3 (which looked amazing) hen it would have been nice to see something. The info was nice though.
Combine that with Marvel Legends series IX just being released in Australia and being all sold out straight away along with the fact that our cables stll out along with the fact that my hand still hurts along with the fact that my wifes going to be gone for a while and i'm quite depressed.
I'll have to do a strip o reflect what happened (e3). Oh well a least Ep III comes out tomorrow. That'll have to cheer me up. RIght!
RIGHT??

2005-05-13T18:20:00.000-07:00

Well. The comic has moved. It now exists at
yearone.spiderspawn.com

So there you go. I'll probably keep this for my blog and post stuff relevant to Yearone and oher comic projects i'll be working on. I'll probably have this linked to the other site as well.
So yeah, year one had a rocky start. This wasnt the best way o get a webcomic up there but its all i could manage.
Anyway we've moved up the ladder now hopefully to bigger and better things.
Hopefully everyone follows me along..

2005-05-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep23 12/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Howdy. Ok things are progressing at the Spiderspawn network (cant actually remember if ive mentioned it here) and I'll soon be moving to a network which hosts some really cool comics that i feel honoured to be moving into.

The new address will be Yearone.spiderspawn.com and i have my own forum and everything! Whee! The guys there are friendly and great so it should be a lot of fun. I'm updating every day as this plot goes on for a bit. :)

2005-05-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep22 11/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Its late but its up! I love L'il 'Lectro.

2005-05-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

Year One ep21 10/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Oh lordies. The start of the ridiculous Gobby and 'Lectro storyline. This one just kept on going.
Anyway - enjoy! :) I love Lil Lectro.

Im thinking of putting an extra panel at the bottom where spidey explains to non comic fans the whole point of the strips that are comic-related.

2005-05-09T02:52:00.000-07:00

Year One Bonus 09/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Update! Final chapter of the mysterious Future Spidey story. Oh, Future Spidey - how we all hope you're wrong. Back to regular programming soon.

2005-05-08T17:20:00.000-07:00

Year One Bonus 08/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Ha! haha..ahem. Yes. Bet you didnt see that comng. I'm petrified about the new SW movie. It looks so cool, but ..well, y'know.
Anyway - I was watching that ep of South Park with future self stan and thought wouldnt it be cool if Future Spidey came back to warn him that SWIII was lame. Now i just have to think of 3 alternate storylines. One it case its good, one case its bad and one in case its average.
We'll be back to our regular scheduled programming tomorrow plus i'll throw in the final episod eof this bonus storyline.
I'm trying to get something sorted out so if you vote you get a reward. Lots of sites do this. If you vote you get some extra artwork. I'm going to go through the entire Marvel Universe 'year one-erizing' everybody! And i mean everybody! I should be finished around 2067. So im thinking of putting up those sketches as bonuses for voting people. Havent quite figured out how that works yet.
As for yearone.keenspace.com its coming along. Just managed to upload most of the strips (i have to transfer them from my laptop to my pc on floppies so its annoying.) and I'm hoping to get the banner up this week plus get a few extra pages done, like the archives page and maybe get a blog page of sorts set up.

2005-05-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Year One Bonus 07/05/05 Click to enlarge

I mean it. Really. Click to enlarge. Ive shrunk the pictures down as on certain computers its going over the text and making a mess.
Again if you want an alternative viewing method check out
yearone.keenspace.com (although keenspace appears to be down as im typing this) Ive just got a bare bones site going there..will be adding blogs, links, etc soon. Thanks to those whove offered to go into a link exchange with me. I'm definitely interested and will do so once i get the keenspace site up and running fully. hopefully sometime this week.

2005-05-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

Year One Bonus 06/05/05

A brief interruption from the regular series. Nothing really to do with comics, just my own little commenary on stuff. What could Future Spidey-kid (still have go work out that name) be coming back to warn current Spider-person (see. I just cant decide) about. All will be revealed.

I'll update over he weekend with this storyline. This is actually the most recent stuff i did, but its kinda time-dependent so i had to squeeze it in somewhere..

2005-05-06T19:33:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep19 06/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Ahhh. I feel quily about posting this up now but i already have the episode numbers worke dout in advance. I'm not even updating 7 days a week. Still trying to get my yearone.keenspace.com up and running but not having much time to devote to learning html. I'll try to at least get the site up to date with the strips this weekend but I'm a bit sick at the moment so we'll see how we go..

2005-05-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep18 05/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Part 2 of my Incredibles ripping off the FF storyline. I acually heard an ad like this proclaiming The Incredibles to be the only suburban superhero team and though tof how annoyed the FF would be. Pretty ugly Lil Thing in the 3rd panel but hey. :)
And yes i know i did say 5 on the 5/05/05 but im not that organised plus it'll wreak havoc with the order of the soon to be-official YearOne site so..yeah.

2005-05-04T19:13:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep17 04/05/05 Click to Enlarge

Well well, The FF just popped up. :) I'll have to scan in my original drawings of the FF. I had the Thing (now titled L'il Thing..which sounds a bit weird) down perfect and i just couldnt recreate it in the strip. I like how hes sitting on the beanbag tho.
This was inspired basiclly by how much a rip off of the FF , the movie the INcredibles was. At least two of the characters anyway. What were they thinking. Ok cool- make the girl invisible- but force bubbles as well. Ah man.

2005-05-03T03:24:00.000-07:00

Year One ep16 03/05/05 Click to Enlarge

2005-05-01T19:01:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep15 01/05/05 Click to enlarge

I'm putting up tomorrows strip today as i wont be around tomorrow and i may not be able to access the net from where i am. So yeah.
Also be sure to check out..
yearone.keenspace.com
just got starte dthere. Its a bare bones site with nothing but the comic archive. Still at least it works better than the ol blog site.

Finally, i was thinking since on Thursday it'll be the 05/05/05 i might put up 5 strips. I may save the bulk of 'Gobby and 'Lectros cunning plan' for that day.

2005-04-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

Year One ep14 29/04/05 Click to enlarge

Wow. L'il Doom looks quite bad in the bottom two panels. Quite jarring.Anyhoo, just posting to say i should be getting a site for YearOne set up at Keenspace over the weekend so from now on i'll be at yearone.keenspace.com as well.
I'll still keep updating here though - i may use this as more of a personal blog as well as the comic strips.
I've also stopped drawing Year One as i have up until ep40 to put up and i dont like working so far ahead. I want to be no more than a week ahead. At some point i may put up multiple strips a day as theres a really long winded storyline featuring Gobby and 'Lectro coming up.

2005-04-28T17:35:00.000-07:00

Year One ep13 28/04/05 Click to enlarge

2005-04-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

Year One ep12 27/04/05 Click To Enlarge

This is probably the firststrip ive done that i was remoely pleased with.
i thought it was funny, plus i love drawing battle ravaged L'il Spidey. :)

2005-04-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep11 26/04/05 Click to Enlarge

Erk. Apologies about the blurriness. Thi sis where i switched to Illustrator and by he time it was finished it was still apparent that there was more work to be done. I think the next strip or two is back to the old way and then afte rthat ist clear sailing. Really recommended to click on he picture to enlarge in this case as its really quite hard to read.
And yes, i know. I make a lot of typos. Damn keyboards fault.

2005-04-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

Year One Ep10 25/04/05 Click to ENLARGE!

Gah. Cant wait until about a weeks time when we get into the good strips. Say goodbye to this font soon as i managed to get hold of Illustrator in a strip or two so it looks a whole lot better. At this stage the process looked like this.
1) scan into computer.
2) clean up image in photoshop.
3) insert image into word document and place panels and word balloons. Awful procedure.
4) covert word doc to jpeg
5) go back into photoshop and clean up again.

The stage of converting the doc to a picture really took a lot out of the pictures. Hopefully you'll be able to see an improvement soon.

So anyway this is a L'il Doom Storyline. Ive decided that most of the charactres are gonna have L'il preceding their names. Abviously i will still put up a Tm Marvel acknowledgemnt on my news site (getting it done now) as i am using a whole pile of marvel back history here. But my adaptation fo the characters still remain my own i feel.
Anyway, yes - this wasnt meant to be a long storyline but they just kind of wrote themselves. I have another one coming up with Gobby and 'Lectro which just kept on going and going, so much sao i had to put a few breaks in the storyline in there. BUt this wasnt that painful.

Anyhoo this is ep10, ive just signed up to online comics.net so welcome if youve foudn the strip through there. Ive done up to ep30 and they're sitting ont he laptop ready to go, so it looks like i'll be updating every day for the time being at least (weekdays anyway).
Remember if you like it, please voe for me so i can get Year One up the ranks and get others o read it.
Thanks people.

2005-04-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

YEar One Ep9 22/04/05 CLICK to ENLARGE

Not too big on this one. I had left it out of my original plotting so i had the previous and the next strip. So, yeah, i just had to cram something in.

2005-04-21T03:31:00.000-07:00

Year One: Ep8 21/04/05 CLICK TO ENLARGE

2005-04-20T02:58:00.000-07:00

Year One: 20/04/05 ep7 - CLICK to Enlarge.

2005-04-19T05:38:00.000-07:00

Year One: 19/04/05 Ep6 CLICK to ENLARGE

I'm a litle concerned

2005-04-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

I have great plans for this comic but i am also concerned. Im concerned about the legality of it all and copyright problems. I guess my characters are more inspired by Marvel characters than based on but if im using them to comment on the history of the characters than im basically saying they are them. Which means badness.
As a friend told me the worst Marvel could do (and this is assuming ive hung around for a considerable time and built up a decent web presence) is tell me to stop or else but i dont want it to come to that. Im not worried about being sued or fined just worried about losing this creative endeavour.
On the other hand i have been doing reading on this subject and i turns out that this isnt really an issue if the work is a parody which i can also see this being. When i do tend to mention charactres history or look at material thats been developed formally its for he sake of pointing fun. (An upcoming strip involves the whole web shooters vs organic web shooters debacle) BUt either way its a murky area.
Looking at the 30 odd strips ive done so far, removing the marvel connection wouldnt really detract a whole lot. Although i personally like it, i like to make fun of the characters and stuff (so i guessit is a parody then?) But the point is it could still function as a bunch of kids in grade 1 who happen to be superheroes, i just wouldnt have all this source material ripe for the making fun of. (Ive got so many stories in my head for satire of the FF and the X-men!!) But i could do it if i needed to.
Ive also been desperately hinking fo some other strip ideas just in case and i have a efw formulated. Its crazy, its almost as if ive realised this can be the perfect output for my creative energies. im wanting to do like, 5 strips, at once which probably isnt a good idea. I'll just stick to this for the time being and see what happens.

Thanks for reading. Oh - another comment - ive realised that a lot of the strips ive done work better on a daily format (the storylines are quite drawn out sometimes) so im going to give that a try. Crazyness maybe, but if it fails i'll bump back down to 3 per week.
Oh - i'm also trying to get this strip known (i know, i know, a whole 5 done so far) by putting it on various lists. if you like what you see (ignore the site - i WILL do something with it i swear) then try voting for me.

Thanks.

2005-04-18T20:14:00.000-07:00

Year One: 18/04/05 No 5 - CLICK to enlarge!

I thought it was funny. Maybe i didnt pull it off as well as i thought i did. Still debating over colour vs none colour. I coloured ..i think it was the 15th strip roughly and it looked rathe rgood. Better than this shoddy example. I'll post a pic that i cropped just of spidey for comparison. Still debating colour vs black and white. Both have their positives.

2005-04-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

Just an example of mroe recent colouring. its been blown up so unfortunately it doesnt look as good (not that i think it looks brilliant mind, but still better than my pathetic half efforts so far). Just imagine it shrunk down to a normal sized spidey and compare it vs black and white. I just cant decide. Oh well, this IS supposed to be a constantly developing work in progress...

Whoops

2005-04-15T18:07:00.000-07:00

I was all about to pop the next one up but i didnt have it on my disc. Must still be on the laptop, Will be back later tonight.
Also added the comic onto a few webcomics list so u dont know how that'll go.
Anyhow - ive got about 20 done up ready to go so i may start updating every day but to anyone that wants to check it out i'll make Mon, Wed and Fri firm update days with hopefully 2 inbetween.

Thanks guys.

2005-04-15T03:36:00.000-07:00

Year One: 15/04/05 - Click to enlarge

2005-04-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

Year One: 13/04/05 Click to Enlarge
Just so people know i'll be trying to update at a max 5 days a week, at a min 3 days a week.
I was stil experimentng with colour when i did these strips (about 6 months ago) so..yeah. Not sure yet whether i'll be sticking with colour or leaving it black and white. let me know if anyone has any thoughts...

YearOne: 12/04/05

2005-04-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

YearOne: 12/04/05 click to enlarge
Again there are many horrible problems what with the fonts, the dialogue and the art being cut off but hey im slowly improving and getting the hang of stuff so stick with me and we'll get this boat moving..er..car rolling..show rolling..whatever.

Happy Birthday Dad.

2005-04-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

Yep. Me old Dads birthday today. Happy birthday Dad! Now i'll know if you're following this or not. heh. Heh. Heh.
Anyway - the first strip is up - Year One: Episode 1.
No clever names for me. I'll probably spend as much time thinking them up as i do the strip. Now apologies for the quality for the first few strips. Ive just started using Illustrator which has helped immensely with fonts and such so just put up with the poor quality word text for now. Also I messed up the colour in the first strip, it depleted my line art pretty badly but i shot myself in the foot and had to keep on going with it.
This is going to be a work in progress so it'll improve as it goes. Any feedback please go for it. Although no constructive criticism please just nice raving goodness!
Thanks.
Ok - hopefully i can figure out how to put this up alright..

2005-04-10T06:14:00.000-07:00

Year One: Episode 1 10/04/05 - click to enlarge

So far so good..

2005-04-07T17:09:00.000-07:00

Feels a little weird typing to nobody so im just considering this to my personal journal. Hopefully it'll be a nice little bit of history in 5 years time when the strips still going and a worldwide success.
Heh.

Hmmn.

Anyway - I should elaborate further to you reader, er..readers (ive sent this link to my wife so i know at least one person will see this).
Basically the premise of the strip is taking comic characters and shrinking them down in size to the tender age of 6. And what do you know they all happen to be attending grade one at the same school. HIlarity ensues. Ahem. Hopefully sometimes at least. Well, if not hilarity then mild amusement at least. Actually, yes, mild amusement. Thats what im aiming for. Babbling aside..

Hence the title - Year One. Its supposed to be a clever pun. You know - Year 1 - Batman; Year 1 - primary school. You comic fans will know what i mean. And speaking of comic fans, while this is the main group that will probably be interested in this i hope its fairly accessible to anyone. My wife likes it and she doesnt know anything about comics. Truthfully many of the jokes do go over her head but she says she still likes it. Of course she has to.
Its not going to be strictly comic based. I'll be having some fun with the characters and making some 'commentary' on current comics storylines and stuff but i'll be messing around with everything from videogames to movies being a huge fan of all three forms of entertainment.

Anyway ive got about a dozen prepped ready to go and while they're looking quite rough at the moment thats more due to the process of getting them on the monitor - honest. I cant figure out photoshop for the life of me so im having to resort to all sorts of impractical ideas to get stuff done but hopefully if i can stick with it as it grows and develops my skill with the computah will as well and i'll get a finished product that im relatively happy with.

Anyway thats it for now - check back in a few days and i may actually have something to show for all this effort. God, i hope this works.

The beginning

2005-04-06T19:10:00.000-07:00

Ok. I should explain what this. I am attemtping to dip my toe into the ever growing ocean of web comics that seem to proliferate the net lately. Its something ive been wanting to do for a while and now ive actually got the resources and ideas to fully realise this goal.
I wont go into a boring personal recap here, suffice to say ive been drawing comic strips since primary school where i actually printed out my strips and sold them around the playground. Heh. Anyway since then i moved more into drawing comic books unil about 8 years ago when I tried to submit a strip to the local paper.
Suffice to say it didnt work (they didnt want to spend the money) and since then ive been toying with the idea of getting something up and running on the net. I was debating between a superhero style comic book, a fantasy comic book or a comic strip. It seems the comic strip idea is a bit easier to commit to so im giving it a go.

BUt what is it? And who is reading this anyway..? Ah, I'll leave that for the next post.
I hope to launch sometime this weekend, just need to make sure ive got a decent backlog of strips ready.

And yes i know its lame to start up a weblog on a blogging site but i know nothing at all about internet stuff so thats my only option.

MOre later..