by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: Matt Cubed

I am very sorry for that green. It is a bit light-saber-y.

Matt Cubed was a comic that I created with the intention of making it incredibly easy to draw and something I could scribble out with minimal effort that would remain in black and white to make it easier to print.  The downside to this is that it reads like it was scribbled out with minimal effort.  It was however a lot of fun to make and I’ve heard a few people say they actually really like it.

The story is about a guy who gets pulled into his computer and must save it from the clutches of evil viruses and rogue programs.  Although it sounds like I’m ripping off Tron, I was actually thinking more about Reboot at the time.  It was never intended as anything serious or particularly deep, but there are a few nice panels in there and I do like a few of the characters.

The idea forced its way into my brain when I was trying to fix my housemate’s computer whilst particularly hung over and was surprised to be shown a nested installation of Windows and what appeared to be some form of evolving eco-system of programs that were the result of every old computer that my housemate had ever had having its hard drive copied onto its replacement, like some kind of digital parasite.

I was tempted to have a go at re-igniting Matt Cubed when Tron Legacy was announced and go for an updated aesthetic too, but of all my projects, this one is probably in the most “completed” state clocking in at three issues and I’m fairly keen to leave it there.  It does mean that Matt will remain stuck in his computer, but it could be worse.

Archived collections of the comics can be downloaded below in .rar format, unpackaged using WinRar.

Matt Cubed Issue 1.rar

Matt Cubed Issue 2.rar

Matt Cubed Issue 3.rar

Additional Notes:

I’m actually tempted to write and draw this just on the strength of that cover.

Whilst I was digging out my Matt Cubed archives, I rather excitingly found this cover image for my planned fourth issue that I never really started but had a good idea about.

It was basically going to be a comic that you could read forwards to the centre or backwards to the centre and would start from either end and was going to set up a secondary nemesis for Matt.  The “To Be Continued…” would be in the centre spread.

It was something I’ve seen done in a couple of children’s books that we had at school where there were two sides to the same story.  My favourite one involved a fisherman catching a fish that then gets away when read the first way, and a fish being caught by a fisherman and then escaping when read the other.

by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: The Student Squad

The cover of the one complete issue of the Student Squad

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.

by ·Comments Off on The Incomplete Works

I don’t believe in New Years Resolutions.  I think they’re daft and only set you up to look stupid when you inevitably fail.  Not only that, but if something is worth doing, you might as well just do it instead of needing to tie it to some date-triggered calendar event.  Despite all of this, I do have a sort-of-resolution-of-sorts.

I have a chronic problem whereby I constantly start projects and leave them hanging.  I know that I am not alone in this, but my problem extends to the point that I get distressed about their incomplete state, procrastinate, get more stressed about it, assign some arbitrary requirement for ultimate quality on the project, panic that my work will never be good enough for it and then never progress at all.  I have one project in particular that was born out of a five minute think on the bus about what I would do if I had to do a 24 hour comic, grew from there and now sits in my “I will never be artistically good enough to tell this story” pile with everything else.

My resolution that is happening at new year but is not a new years resolution is therefore the following:

This year, I will work on at least one of my unfinished projects and see it through to either completion, or a state where if it was never continued, it wouldn’t be considered unfinished.

In order to do this I’m going to source a little help from anyone who is interested.  Over the next week or so, I will be posting information on each of my unfinished projects and samples of them and inviting any criticism or encouragement for which, if any, projects have wings and which, if any, projects should be buried.

I might not take any advice or suggestions, but I thought I might invite it, partly to see if anyone beyond a few people I know actually reads this, and if anyone out there really desperately wants comments on at all.