Monday, May 11, 2009

Rick the Raptor


Hey. Since progress with my major works is slow (I've got my graphic novel, Stupid, completely darkened, typed, revised, and ready for publication. Now the problem is the publishing part), I'll post a link to a comic strip series I made and posted in late 2008. I started the strips in 2007, then picked them up again in summer of 2008 and began posting one on every weekday in August. The series is not a major work of mine, and the sense of humor is much more tame and typical than that of my other comics. In other words - they make you chuckle at best. I still like Rick the Raptor, though. I don't think a comic strip is supposed to produce the kind of hysterical, rolling-on-the-floor laughing that a solid story consisting of a series of pages should. The idea of a strip is to create a clever punch line using a minimal series of frames. The main factor of my point here is that gut-busting humor is rarely based on punch lines. The funniest humor is made up of funny dialogue and events that may be funny because of ridiculousness, randomness, the shock factor, witiness or rudeness. A comic strip is funny in the sense of a quick yet clever joke is being made that at the end makes you think "Oh, I get it".

Anyway, Rick the Raptor follows the daily antics of Rick and his pals living in a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and humans were looked at as simple animals. Rick, the unmotivated, lazy, grumpy main character of the series, accompanied by his friends - Clarissa, his sensible yet rowdy neighbor, Dave, his bestfriend and drinking buddy, and Tony, the local bartender, star in 94 comic strips on this official myspage page I created earlier this year. I randomly started posting them in August of 2008. At some point in October, I miscounted and thought that the series would reach episode 99 exactly on Christmas day, so I planned a series of holiday episodes with one final one-framed season-ending frame. When I reached the month of December, however, I recounted and realized it would only be episode 94 on Christmas day. If I had still pushed for episode 99, the season would have ended exactly on New Years, but I had already planned the final episode, thus the final episode of the season remained 94. You can read all of season one at this page, and check out character artwork by clicking the Pics section in the upper left corner of the page. If you have a MySpace account, you can add the page to your friends at the bottom of it. I may make a season 2 some time, but there's no guarentee, for as I have already said, this is not one of my major comics - it's kind of just a side one. If I ever made a season 2, though, I would probably like to see if I could get the strips of both seasons published in a collection book. Anyway, enough babble. Check out the comics for yourself. Sorry again for yet another post of old work.

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