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Creative inspiration comes from the most random places.

Working on this strip reminded us on how random our creative process for the comic really is. Most of the time, the seed of our comics are planted within our random conversations. Somebody (let’s be honest, usually Kris) makes a joke or says something snarky that we find hilarious. If we’re lucky, this conversation happened in Google Talk and I can just copy and paste it into our scripts file. Other times, I try to write up as much of the conversation as I can.

We have a shared file on Google Docs of the scripts we come up with. Sometimes we’re with it enough to plan ahead and write a specific comic script for a particular day. Usually, this happens in the middle of a story line or if there’s some particular event (like Free Comic Book Day, Christmas, or the release of a particular comic) that we want to commemorate. Other times we write up the script and leave it in a long list of “Undated Comics.” If we’re busy and haven’t come up with a particularly good script for a day, we can dip into this list and find a suitable script. I haven’t kept an accurate count, but I’d say we have a good ten undated scripts available at any particular time. Today’s script was one of the early ones that we probably wrote around May or June. It’s been patiently waiting for us, eagerly anticipating it’s chance to be shown to the world.

When we choose a script, Kris goes through and quickly storyboards it out. His stick figure doodles let him quickly sketch out the general layout of the comic.

If he’s working on the comic when I’m around, then he lets me seen the original layout to make sure that his vision of the comic matches what I envisioned when I wrote the script. For example, today he took a picture of his sketch with his phone and sent me a MMS picture of the layout. If I’m not available, then Kris proceeds on his own and draws out the comic. We’ve talked previously about Kris’s tools to do the comic and they haven’t changed. He’s been very happy with Manga Studio and is still finding a lot of new features of it. The end product gets posted here for the whole world to see.

We had a slight panic this morning at Ret-Conned HQ when it looked like new comics weren’t going to come out until Thursday, but we’ve done some more digging and figured out that things will still be coming on Wednesday. That was a close one.