1/16/2005
Lame-Up, part 1
Here's a little bit of creative history for you.
I've been cartooning professionally (meaning getting "paid" for my work) for almost 20 years. Haven't had much success comparatively; I'm not exactly a household name, and my characters aren't lined up for animated features. But I have been in this business long enough to have forgotten my origins.
Back when I first started, I had my own comic. Lasted all of two issues. But the characters from the book managed to appear in several other publications before I changed my focus to science fiction. I never really fleshed them out in as much detail as I do today; they were simple broad parodies of super heroes, and back then that was enough.
Which explains why I forgot about them.
In yet another of the infamous creative chats, we started talking about old characters and how lame they were in comparison to our more recent creations. We even started a thread on the boards. And then someone challenged others to update their lame characters to match our current styles. That came at a very convenient time; I just found a batch of my old comics and was seriously considering reviving some of the old guard.
One character in particular always struck me as funny (funny "ha ha", not funny "strange"). His name was Generic, a cheap bounty hunter who hired himself out for really odd jobs on the cheap. I never got the chance to fully work with him, as my book got canned and the anthologies he was appearing in followed suit. But when I saw his visuals with a fresh eye, he stuck with me. So I answered that revival challenge with this:
Generick, Hero for Hire. For Less.
Yup, made him an alien, but I kept his schtick intact. In fact, his first appearance basically wrote itself (which I really need to get off my arse and start very soon) based right on the whole "for less" routine.
Odd how things work like that.
Even odder how the whole "Lame Character Revival" has developed into something beyond what I expected. And I'll explain that in my next entry.
Stick around for a few. It's coming right up.
Doc "To Be Continued" Absurd
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