The Student Squad is pretty much the first thing I ever worked on with any regularity.  At one point I did fifty days of daily updates to the web comic, building a relatively substantial arc of events and filling a nice healthy archive.

There are two reasons why I don’t really carry on with this any more:

1)  The characters were all loosely based on some very close friends of mine, so I never felt I could do anything too interesting with them and due to mild superstition was always scared of damaging or killing any of them just on the off chance that I might have created some form of Voodoo comic.

2)  I don’t think it’s very good.  At a later date I think I will compile a list of mistakes that webcomic authors can make drawing completely on my experience with the Student Squad, staring with the author self-insertion character and going from there.

Here is a pdf file of the first issue of the Student Squad.  Despite this being the first issue, it does still draw slightly on an archive of the older webcomics but was intended as an entry point for new readers.

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE (Recommend Right Click and “Save Target As” – File is about 30mb)

If that file is way too big, it is also available online in an old version of my website that I keep alive and can be found by following this link.

If I ever did resurrect this project and attempt to work on it further, I think I would go down the reboot-route and have some ideas on how I could make it more interesting and less…in my opinion…rubbish.  In short, I find it highly unlikely that I will carry on the Student Squad’s story as it exists above.

More than anything else, The Student Squad was a vehicle that taught me a hell of a lot about drawing both inside and outside of a computer and about web editing and maintaining a website.  If anyone ever wants to learn anything about any of these things, I can’t recommend trying to maintain a webcomic strongly enough.

Additional Notes:

It’s bizarre that almost every webcomic out there has some form of author self insertion and it rarely helps the comic.  There are a few notable exceptions but really it just seems like a bad idea.  This desire to put a caricature of yourself into your work I think goes beyond basic wish fulfilment and taps into something different.  It’s something I plan to write about and explore more in the future, and one of my more recent projects deals with self insertion characters in more detail.