Author notes

#837

Amelius

on Jan. 5, 2010

HAPPY SIXTH ANNIVERSARY YOU GUYS!
(and yesterday was my 2nd wedding anniversary!)

I've been on DD 6 years officially today! The 6th of January, 2004, was when I got my account on Drunk Duck and uploaded my first comic ( a handful of them actually!) and "Polar Bar" was the first one. And it was terrible! Do I regret naming this comic "Charby the Vampirate" when people complain that he's not in it enough? NEVARRR!

So here's a picture of the original housemates in the style I was attempting to draw just before I put up my first webcomic, except now that I can actually draw here's what they'd look like now if I'd kept the style!


This was when it was some kind of weird amalgamation of cartoons I used to watch (particularly Beetlejuice if anyone remembers that! And anything by Chuck Jones, who deserves credit for the curly smiles even though I took them to a bit more extreme! And Ren & Stimpy, and Eek the Cat, Animaniacs…), western-styled Chibis, and comics like Calvin & Hobbes and Peanuts. You can see these more in the proportions of course. I was already moving away from this style when I posted the first CTV comic,and I moved further away from it as I went on. Not that I didn't like the Tim Burton meets Hello Kitty style I had before, I was just sick to death of people comparing it to that stupid angsty goth comic. You know the one, I shouldn't hafta name names! I've ranted enough on that one though. ;)
Now Mye doesn't have stringy Witch Hazel hair, Hex has changed considerably as well. He started off with a number of variations on his hair theme, from pointy like this to round curls. As I might've mentioned before, I had this hairdo on another character back in '95, who oddly got more of an expy with Tony save for the hair (his name was even Tony) I figured Mye would have a magic feather duster at the time too. Before I started the web version Menu was a light tan-brown, but when there wasn't a similar color of pencil when I switched from crayon to prismacolors, his fur became the golden brown it is now. Charby's hair had gotten much pointier only a few pages after his first comics in 2002 thanks to people mistaking it for pigtails! He also had a little button-like nose for a while until I decided to adapt "anime noses" which were a bit smaller, because I didn't want him looking too much like an animal. I wasn't too clear on whether these were all just chibis or what until I introduced Vic to the comic when I was attempting something with Anime styled characters. As such,Vic seemed painfully out of place with these guys!

I haven't updated the vote incentive in a while, and rather than crowd this space with more images I thought it might be better to post the other thing I made for today elsewhere: