About October's Fools - the history
Why October's Fools?
Well, why not? It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not actually a cartoonist. In fact, for most of my existance to date, I believed I couldn't draw anything more complex than a stick figure, and that only on a good day. So why on earth would I of all people decide to start an online comic strip? I'm still not entirely certain why myself. But I'll fill you in on what led up to this, anyway.
I've been a fan of comics for most of my life; many people are. I'm not an overly enthusiastic fan, most of the time during my youth I'd just happen to read the regular ones that were in my daily newspapers and so on. Occassionally when I was a kid, I'd pick up books of my favorites - Family Circus, Garfield, Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey, Peanuts, etc. But I can't say that I ever remember thinking, 'This is something that I would like to do some day.'
At some point in the 11th grade or thereabouts, I discovered something about myself. I could write. In fact, I could write and make people laugh, which was something of a major event for me since at the time I couldn't tell a joke to save my own life. That was the point at which I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I worked hard for years, writing short stories, working on a novel, getting better at my chosen craft and enjoying the praise that was heaped upon me by those few I allowed to read my work. I still had a long way to go before I could be published in a large magazine or anything, but what the heck. I was having a lot of fun, and appeared to be making real progress.
When it came time to head off to college, I decided to enroll in a general arts and sciences program at Sheridan College, in Oakville Ontario. I'd taken a number of excellent night classes there on fiction writing, and liked the school a great deal, and in addition, the program itself would allow me to study virtually anything I wanted; it was almost completely composed of elective credits rather than required credits. I figured that would be a great way to get a well-rounded education that would serve me well as a writer. Unfortunately, it was also about this time that that most dreaded of writer's afflictions struck me - writer's block. I'm not sure myself whether it was laziness, the loss of the creative spark or some other factor, but I found myself unable to complete (or even effectively start) short stories. My studies started wandering towards computer science, my jobs started pulling me into technical support and administration fields. But all the while I felt the urge to write, and would get very frustrated when I was foiled in my attempts.
Enter the Internet, and online comics. A long-time friend of mine introduced me to a strip called User Friendly in early 1998. UF was relatively new then, having begun in late 1997, but I loved it. I didn't keep up with my reading of it right away; I simply chalked it up to 'Wow, the 'net has gotten to be such a neat place lately!' and forgot it. Later that year, I went back to it, caught up on the archives, and have remained a regular reader to this day. I also began corresponding with Iambe, who lured me into Undernet's #userfriendly channel. That's where the story of October's Fools really begins.
It was in #userfriendly that I met several key people and discovered several key comics that have combined to influence me in more ways than I can count. Through the other UFie denizens of Undernet, I discovered Sluggy Freelance and Goats, two of my favorite online comics. I also met two cartoonists, Sirilyan, the writer half of the Waiting for Bob team, and Illiad, who of course draws UF itself.
It was through the reading of Goats, Sluggy and GPF, and a number of conversations with Sirilyan and Illiad about the writing of comics that I came to wonder about how it would be to write one of my own. So I gave it a shot, and to my great creative relief, I found that while it was very different from writing a short story, it was just as much fun and better yet, unaffected by my writer's block. I came up with the October's Fools concept and started writing strips.
I have less explanation for the drawing thing. I have quite a few artistic friends who I could have asked to draw the strip for me, but they're all extremely busy people - I decided that I'd only ask them as a last resort. I have Photoshop, Illustrator, and a Wacom tablet, so I figured it might be fun to try drawing it myself - the web is full of great examples of people who started comics despite an apparent inability to draw, and the artwork always improves over time. This lead me to think that no matter how bad I am now, there is hope for the future. ;)
About October's Fools - the process
It's true that I never get asked about how I draw October's Fools, but damnit, I'm going to put this section in anyway, cause I'm bored out of my skull and feel like adding a bit about how I work and why the style I use changes so often in such a small number of comics.
The creation process of October's Fools is generally based on how I feel I can best convey what I want a particular drawing or strip to convey. Since I really have no background in art whatsoever, it's been one long voyage of discovery for me, figuring out what works for me and what doesn't. Sometimes it has taken me a while to realize that something isn't working out - I believed briefly that Photoshop would become my primary tool in creating comics, but ultimately I missed the cleaner look I was able to get from Illustrator.
Having settled the tool issue as far as actual drawing goes, I eventually recognized another weakness in my process. I was drawing everything freehand and straight from the imagination. Now, there isn't anything wrong with that, but a person with my inexperience won't achieve the best results that way. I decided it would be helpful to have a model to work from. Traditionally that would involve getting an actual person to pose for you, but technophile that I am, I chose an alternative route. I therefore got hold of Metacreation's (now Curious Lab's) Poser 4, and created 3D approximations of each of the primary characters in the strip. I can then dress and pose them as they need to be dressed and posed for any given shot, and I render two images, one with shadows and one without.
I then load both images into Illustrator and use them as a drawing guide, first using the unshadowed image to get all the lines where I want them, and then when it's time to color them, I hide the unshadowed image, revealing the shadowed image underneath it. This becomes a rough template for where light sources are relative to characters, and helps with the colour and shading.
In order to shade, I make use of a feature that was first introduced into Illustrator just recently, in version 9.0. I simply wait until after I've done all of the base colours, which I do in a layer just for colouring. Then I hide that layer, showing the rendered model under the linework I've done, likewise in its own layer. I then use the shadows in the rendered image as another guide; I draw over them in solid black at a transparency of 10%.
About October's Fools - the future
Where I go from here, I'm not sure. I like the way the art is turning out for the most part, though I do still need to figure out a way to incorporate shading and so on into the look of the strips. I also desperately need to improve my drawing speed; it takes me at least a full day to draw each 4 panel black and white strip, and one has taken as much as 3 weeks! That's why OF is currently a weekly feature; I couldn't hope to manage a daily schedule. As my speed gradually improves, I plan to move to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule and ultimately I'd love to make it daily.
What do I hope to accomplish with this comic strip? Well, it's something I'm doing for entertainment. My own entertainment for the most part - it's my creative outlet. But I hope that in the process of entertaining myself, I'll be better able to entertain others. I strongly believe that if you're going to do something fun to entertain people, make sure that you above all others enjoy it. That enjoyment that you feel will permeate the entire project and allow others to more fully enjoy it themselves.
