After reading the Order of the Stick last year, I was quite keen to try and launch a web comic again. In order to not be too ambitious, I wanted something that I could do a regular four panel for that could be funny without setting out to be perpetual comedy and carry a enough story to not stagnate and maintain a certain amount of interest.
One of the few finished panels of Eye: Private Eye.
I know there are inherent problems in shoe horning everything into a four-panel format (most jokes end successfully on the third) but I wanted a standard format to use so that I could work on building a decent website, which is another skill I need work on, with decent archiving and a clear simple design.
Then I made my trademark mistake: I drew the characters, I constructed the framework of a setting, and came to the conclusion that my throwaway idea to just give me something to draw was too good and my artistic talent
will never live up to my expectations. I have to this day drawn two strips and finished neither of them completely.
Eye is a mutant. He’s a runt with a squashed beak like mouth and only one eye. He is sour, grumpy, unkempt, untidy, perpetually hung over, disorganized and penniless. He makes his living as a private detective with his gentle-giant friend Hammerhead, a fearsome looking shark-headed mutant who wants a kitten and has a childish innocence that means he can’t comprehend why people find him frightening.
It’s set in a near-future urban sprawl where mutants are the mutated-disfigured variety as opposed to the super-model with special powers variety and distrusted and downtrodden accordingly. This project is again one of those where I have more in my head and in notes form than is on actual physical pages and the disruption of the transfer from brain to page has been largely self defeating.
I sense that I’m now starting to talk about things which are not merely unfinished and incomplete, but actually not started. Both Eye and Paladin are almost in a planning stage as opposed to anything else. Having said that, this early planning stage for my earlier work would probably mean I had ten pages already before grinding to a halt when I realised I had no idea where I was going. I think I’ve probably grumbled about it before, but planning is very important and my inner-8-year-old weeps every time I admit that.