It’s been since 2010 that I’ve been making my web comic strip “Four Talking Boxes.” I’ve made five strips a week for all those years and next week (as I write this) I’m about to hit four thousand comic strips in that series.
I’m not saying that’s the most comic strips ever made by a person but it is a lot. Especially since I don’t make any money doing it. I would imagine most people who have made that many comic strips did it because they were getting paid to do it. I don’t know what that says about me but I’m glad to have done them.
I also have done about 700 “Message Tee” comics and nearly 800 “Drifting and Dreaming” comics. Again that’s a lot. Being that they don’t make me any money nor earn me any glory all I get for them is bragging rights. No one is very interested in my bragging but still I’m going to brag to the void. Why not? What else do I have to do? Besides make more comics.
“Four Talking Boxes” has never been an attempt at making a commercial comic strip and it has a few things going against it in that area. First off the art is all talking heads and there are no cute little animals. I’ve had the thought that I should design some cute little animals and reuse all the same dialogue to make a new strip that would be more commercial. It’s a silly idea but I’m a dreamer.
Another non-commercial aspect of the strip is a the art. I don’t draw all of those talking heads new for each strip. Since I’m not getting paid I’d never have the time to make new drawings for each strip. I designed each character and drew them multiple time from multiple angles so that I could use those drawings over and over. I can even change their expressions a bit in Adobe Illustrator.
Basically I made my own clip art to make the strip out of. It’s the only way I’ve been able to get the strips done all these years. You can ask any comic strip artist about the grind of drawing a comic strip and they’ll tell you that it usually takes all day to draw a single comic strip. I don’t have all day. Rich and successful comic strip artist often have assistants to help them out too. I have no assistants. I figured out a way to get a strip done and that’s how I do it.
I would say the main non-commercial aspect of “Four Talking Boxes” is that it is ephemeral. There is no plot. There is no continuing story. There is no character growth. The strip is about the brief conversations between the six characters.
When I designed the strip back in 2009, at first, it only had four characters. And it took me a long time to get to those four characters. I always wanted to make a comic strip but it took me a lot of the late 2000s to figure out how. I had at least a half dozen false starts that always ended the same. They’d all take too much time and I’d never be able to devote that much time to them.
Finally it came to me to design some characters, make a bunch of drawings of them, and set them up as vector drawings in Illustrator so that I could manipulate them to fit the writing a little bit more. I made four characters. I forget which ones came first but each character took me two weeks of full time work to complete. That’s a good chunk of time.
After completing the four characters I set to writing the conversations. Pretty quickly I discovered that four characters weren’t enough. It didn’t give me enough character pairings for varied conversations. So within a week of completing the first four characters I spent another four weeks making two more. Then I was ready to start writing.
The writing is what makes the comic ephemeral. It’s writing based on my days working in the Marvel Bullpen back in the 1990s. Back then the Marvel Bullpen was a big room with anywhere from fifteen to thirty people working in it. Everybody who worked there was a creative person but we were doing a boring job. We were also in a big open room and we were allowed to talk. So that’s what we did. We talked to each other all day.
There was always talking in the Bullpen and there was always crazy conversations going on. We were almost all in our twenties. We were young, witty, and with big imaginations. Conversations could start anywhere and end anywhere. And they were all ephemeral. All that wit and humor disappeared into the air never to be heard again. We had a lot of fun but who can even sat what we talked about? It was everything.
It is that spirit of conversation that I’ve tried to capture in “Four Talking Boxes.” Conversation that could go in any direction. Often as I am writing the strip I try to make it so that the first panel gives no clue what the conversation in the last panel will be. You could read just the first and last panels and wonder how we got from point A to point D. That’s often how our conversations went in the Bullpen.
Much like the writing in the strip we also had themes in the Bullpen. Things like, “What super power would you like to have?” often came up. There were lots of, “Would you rather?” discussions. I found the key to a good, “Would you rather?” discussion is to make both choices as equal and balanced as possible. Everybody would rather have Superman’s powers over Green Arrow’s powers.
Much like the characters I write we probably also had a lot of discussions about space ships, space aliens, super powers, and even catch phrases. A lot of escapism was going on in the Bullpen as we chatted away the day doing dreary work so a lot of imaginations were working away too.
“Four Talking Boxes” isn’t a strip that’s designed to be read many strips at a time. One a day is how it’s supposed to be read. Its ephemeral nature is a strength to me but not in the market place. Oh well, I’m just going to keep on doing what I feel like doing as the world doesn’t watch. Pretty much like everybody else out there.