Deus Ex Machina!

The tension mounts ….

The blinking question mark is mostly a thing of the past. These days people call us about the spinning rainbow wheel of doom.

Things go from bad to worse.

Is the suspense killing you yet?

The boss did suggest/request minor changes to the script here and there but, for the most part, he was happy with the results. The main reason that the comic never got published was lack of time and changing attentions. I didn’t have a lot of time to draw at work with my other duties so work on the final art was slow to start and slower to progress. My boss isn’t good at working long form projects. Anything that can’t be pulled together in a few meetings or work sessions will get set aside for something more interesting. The more time that passed without concrete results the more his attention turned to marketing projects that could be produced and distributed quickly.

I’m okay with that. I prefer to use my art skills outside my day job.

I ended up writing the comic. The boss originally hired a writer (one of our clients) to script the story but her first draft was more absurdist and comedic than he expected. He was apparently looking for something more “realistic”. With superheroes.

I think there’s an inherent goofiness to superheroes. If they’re tackling “real” problems they lose a lot of their magic. Superheroes require super problems to justify their existence. The boss and I talked about it and, with guidelines, he told me to come up with a story. I think I probably tooks some ideas from the writer’s script (I don’t remember now) but I added plenty of my own and made things even more absurd. The image posted this morning is the first page of the script. I sketched the whole thing out so the boss could get an idea of what the final product might look like.

I have even less idea what this character’s story is than I did the monkey. If we’d needed a villain for a later story he probably would have been some representative of waste and sloppiness. Mostly I was just filling up another page. Dr. Bland and D.U.L.L. were going to be our heroes first adversaries.

However terrific your hero’s arch foe may be, he’s going to need other adversaries to avoid becoming dull. Not that I had much of an idea of other foes besides Dr. Bland. I wasn’t sure we’d actually get the first issue finished, let alone a second. And at this point we hadn’t actually figured out the storyline for our little comic. But crazed monkeys are fun to draw.

Since we were doing a superhero comic we needed some sort of supervillain. Our customers were (and still are) designers and other creative types and they primarily use Macs. Part of my experience in my oh-so-brief career as a designer was being frustrated trying to convince a client to go with a design that I thought was new and brilliant over the ordinary style they preferred. Obviously there was a conspiracy out there dedicated to crush new and brilliant designwork. Perhaps that conspiracy was also working with the computer industry to force users to stick to poorly designed and heavily restricted computer systems? Who could be behind such a conspiracy?

Obviously – DOCTOR BLAND and the AGENTS of D.U.L.L.!!!!!

I never did get around to figuring out what D.U.L.L. might be an acronym for. Any suggestions?