On
May 16th, 1998, I decided to put up my own webcomic. It depicted a poorly drawn
ragdoll e-mailing a confession of love only to have it returned by the mailer
daemon. His name was the Li'l Depressed Boy -- a childhood nickname of mine --
or LDB for short.
To be honest, it was a ploy to make a girl like me. There was this girl named
Alicia in my print-shop class -- and I was protarded for her. I thought that if
I sent her the comic, she'd read into the subtext and realize that the love note
within the message was for her. It was a really passive aggressive act that yielded
no results.
Anyway, I showed the strip to friends on IRC, and they seemed to like it. I put
it up on the webspace I was using at the time, and made up my mind to update it
daily like a newspaper strip. I wasn't reading any webcomics at this time, so
I thought my idea was revolutionary.
I
updated daily for 5 days; skipped a day; then posted what would be the last strip.
In the last strip, I depicted myself the day before, drawing the best strip EVER.
Only in the last panel, I lost it when my computer exploded. In reality, I didn't
even attempt to draw the previous day.
I had run out of ideas.
Years passed. We all survived the nuclear apocalypse of Y2K. I started an anthology
comic. In it, I got all my friends together to draw short comics of various genres.
Publishing under my
Cartoon Militia label,
I named the book A United Front.
My personal contribution to the anthology was a 2 page story starring LDB in high
school pining after a girl, who he couldn't get the courage to talk to. Instead
of a straight narrative, I underscored the strip with a poem I had written, and
had
Zach Trover draw it.
Four
more issues of United Front came out in the following years. Each one contained
an LDB strip. I rotated artists on the strip and ended up having strips drawn
by
Jamie McKelvie,
Jose
Garibaldi, Evan DiLeo & Lindsay Saterlee.
After United Front closed up shop, it was time to bring the strip back to the
web. I wasn't gonna kid myself and think that I could pull off a daily. The new
comic would be a weekly strip that appeared every Friday. Sticking with the "poetry
+ someone other than me drawing it = the awesome" formula, I set to work.
I faultered after just one week. The second and third weeks featured reruns of
strips I had people draw for United Front. After the sixth week, the strip descended
into pin-ups tagged with notes saying that "new strips [were] coming soon!" And
then, nothing.
I had run out of ideas. AGAIN.
On
May 16th, 2008 -- the 10 year anniversary of that failed attempt to woo Alicia
-- I will post the first strip of a new sequence of Li'l Depressed Boy. Working
with a plan for the first time, I have an outline for stories for the next couple
years. Of which, 11 weeks worth are currently being drawn by a series of fantastic
artists.
Sticking to the last format, I'll be posting new strips each Friday. Coming up
first, is a strip drawn by
Zach Trover --
his first LDB strip since 2001. After Zach, I've got a bunch of great artists
coming up, including: Chris Fenoglio, Kris Struble, Lindsay Jane,
Sina
Grace,
Jim Mahfood and Kanilla
Tripp.
People always say that the third time is the charm, and well, let's test that
out. I'm very excited to share these new strips with you.
S. Steven Struble
Labels: News
