Smells Like Team Spirit

On Friday my office had a football kick-off party. There were hot dogs, nachos, chicken wings, and all other “pig skin watching food.” We were also told that we could wear the jerseys or shirts of our favorite football team. Personally, I’m not a sports fan and don’t have a favorite team’s jersey to wear, so I went with another favorite team.

We’ve been working on a bunch of extra special things over here at Ret-Conned HQ. Today we’re rolling out something that we’ve been throwing back and forth for a couple of weeks. Kris has been wanting ways to expand out his art and practice with more techniques, styles, etc. Over the past couple of weeks, he’s been experimenting with backgrounds and settings, so that our story is no longer always taking place in a blank construct from The Matrix. While it’s definitely improved the comic, it’s given us the added difficulty of figuring out character and speech bubble placement. More then once, Kris has put together a cool background only to have most of it hidden by speech bubbles.

It took us some time to figure out exactly how we wanted to handle this. My initial suggestion was that Al and Kyle become mutes and we do the rest of the strips in pantomime. Kris didn’t think that my epic 100 script tale of Kyle trying to escape from an invisible box inside a hurricane would be that entertaining. Sometimes people just don’t understand my artistic muse.

Instead, we’ve decided to go with a larger format comic. We searched out on the web and looked at a couple of ideas, trying to pull wisdom from the experience of other webcomic artists. Penny-arcade uses the same traditional horizontal strip like we did, but a little bit taller. While that would give us a little bit more room to play with, we’re afraid we’ll quickly run into the same problem. We’re already impressed with how easily PA is able to cram lots of dialog into it’s panels as it is. When we were first designing Ret-Conned, we ruled out the 2x2 grid used by comics like Ctrl-Alt-Delete and Dork Tower. Revisiting it, we still felt like that style could be equally restrictive. Finally, we decided on a single column, four row approach like Jeph Jacques uses on Questionable Content.

Not only will the new style give Kris a larger canvas to play with background artwork, but it’ll also give us freedom to break the panels up into smaller panels if needed. At least, that’s until Kris sees the scripts for the “Al & Kyle on Hollywood Squares” storyline and restricts me to four panels again. My muse, they understand it not.