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SFR001

xailenrath

on Sept. 20, 2022

Back on my B.S. again!
Reposting all the strips in the ongoing emotional breakdown of This Cartoonist so that you may take a peek into my head.

It all started WAY before this, but, this is as good a place to start as any.

This is strip one of Shrimp Fried Riot, a comic I created in 2004/2005, featuring my avatar/self, known in this comic as Octavius.

This comic, "Shrimp Fried Riot", originally started as a different comic: A joint project between myself and a then-friend, who also wanted to do a "slice-of-life" comic. We collab'd on a couple of strips and after deliberation and input from others, wound up calling it "The Hamster Wheel", due to us living in Bellingham Washington, the inhabitants, colloquially known as "Hamsters". (It was almost "Hamster CAGE", but, I thought Wheel sounded "cooler".)

Unfortunately, I dropped out of the project briefly for about 3 weeks and change, due to depression and the art block that often comes with it. When I got over that wave, I re-connected with said 'friend', only to find out that MY character had been written out of "his comic". He renamed the project and went on without me, so, hard feelings aside, I took what part of the comic was mine, re-worked the character designs and went on my own from there.

At first, I made a comic called "Plastic Reality". In it, my avatar was made into identical triplets: Dennis, Daniel and Donald, characters that I originally created during childhood to parody Donald Duck's nephews - each representing my id, ego and superego. I thought that, since I was written out of what was once the Hamster Wheel, a comic I helped MAKE, the next comic I would make would literally have three times as much "ME".

Later on, I doctored the project a bit, in order to contribute to a local print periodical of comics, created by some of my artistic friends and neighbors back when I lived in Bellingham, Washington. That project, due to a clash of egos from the guys responsible, sadly, didn’t quite bear much fruit, (and when it DID, I was cut outta THAT, too) but, I kept on.

After Plastic Reality didn't really go anywhere at the time, I started a new comic - chibi style - "Shrimp Fried Riot"! Named for the "shrimpy" style of character design that I'd started using.
I give full credit for that to Todd Nauck and the (original) 'Teen Titans Go' comic book, based on the original version of that cartoons, not the crappy version of "Teen Titans Go" that Cartoon Network is currently shoving down its audience's throats.

I used Denny, Danny and Donny again several times over the last decade and a half, with an obvious design change so that they looked more like their creator.
(In their original version from WAAAAY back, their design was based on Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, and they were basically half-human, half-penguin.
I'll explain that later.

Anyway, I kept scribbling SFR strips for a while as a hobby. It lasted 20 strips, plus a pin-up or 2 and a later follow-up comic called “My Own Personal Apocalypse”. (Which I still do from time to time.)

This iteration of the comic was semi-autobiographical, but mostly fanciful, as, Bellingham, the self-proclaimed “City of Subdued Excitement”, had it’s share of odd occurances, weirdoes and things best left unexplained. This strip is probably the first place that I routinely employed the chibi style that I have taken such a shine to over the years.

With Octavius, in this first strip, is a chibi version of my best friend, Jesse Dukellis, who, sadly, passed away in September of 2009. I still miss him more than words or even mere comics can express. Honestly, it was the anniversary of that occurance that made me want to reload these strips to the interwebs, in all their dubious glory, with a less-than-sanitized creator commentary on the impetus behind them.