It was a dark and stormy night…
No, not really. It was a cold January winter day. That’s the truth. I was learning to use Wordpress and was fascinated by all of its features, plugins and the multitudes of themes which are available for it. Prerusing around the web I came upon this theme site: ComicPress.Org and was delighted to discover that someone had created a theme for displaying comics.
I downloaded the Comicpress theme, set it up, and began working through its features. It is really a cool piece of work. But it didn’t quite do what I was hoping it would do. I didn’t want to have to BLOG about each comic, I just wanted to roll them out on a daily basis and let things take their course. I downloaded the free Athualpa theme: Atahualpa Theme and found that it was pretty easy to modify colors, fonts, columns and nearly every other theme feature. Then I discovered that Wordpress will let you write and pre-post everything and schedule it so that it will be auto-published on a certain day at a certain time. It works great! We created a batch of comic panels, upload them and create the daily pages and then schedule them into the future to be published. It works and runs like a Swiss watch. Perfect!
Once I figured out how to do it, the next thing was to come up with a comic strip. Years ago, 1997-1998, the Internet was taking off like a Saturn V rocket and we were selling computers and installing networks like crazy. Windows 95 had arrived and Windows 98 was just making its entry and things were jumping. I used to sit and work late at the shop and with a dozen or so computers runnings all around me on benches, connected to the Internet, but waiting for the technician to come back and finish the repairs in the morning. One day I got to thinking about those computers, if they could become sentient, self-aware, and could go out on to the Internet when no one was around to see them, what would they do, what would they say? Where would they go?
Well, my son, Brian, loves to draw. So after several days of talking about it and asking him how he would do it, he sat down at a computer and generated the first Hello World comic panel for me. It was exactly what I was looking for, but which I had been unable to do myself. We made a deal between us and now he is the comic artist and writer. I had many storyline ideas, but none of them have made it to daylight. He has had more than enough ideas to keep the thing rolling. These are now his cartoons and his comics, his thinking and his gags. I am simply sitting back and enjoying them.
I hope that you will also enjoy them. If you start at the beginning, at read through each one, you will pick up all of the characters. You will see that after a month or so, he became much more comfortable with creating the cartoons and putting them online. I tell him that he is building his resume and that after a year or so I will see about having all of the cartoons bound into a book so that people can simply buy the book and read the entire story. We will see.
If you like the strip please tell your friends. If you do not, then you might try looking here, The Comic Portal where there are hundreds of other web comics to check out.
Have a nice day, and please come back.
Clint Bridges
