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Recently I’ve been watching the Batman cartoon from the ninetees. Which is handsdown the best Batman cartoon ever made. While watching it I noticed something interesting. Whenever Batman is up against a regular gangboss the stories are a lot better then when he’s up against an excentric foe. The obvious reason behind this is because with an excentric foe you can focus on the fantastic nature of it. But when the bad guy is just a gang boss, the writers can’t fall back on that. They have to write a compelling story.

This is kinda the same reasoning I used when deciding to stop THOM and moving on to another comic. THOM has no ‘rules’ or ‘boundaries’. Everything goes from sci-fi to fantasy. But this lack of limitations makes it very hard to write good stories. With the exception of Shazram none of the characters have had a chance to develop or grow. Too much weird stuff going on for that.

This is why I wanted to create the IT comic and deliberately set it in a real world. Though I’m still unsure about the inclusion of something fantastic. A lot of IT webcomics tend to have either an animal, artificial intelligence or other non-real thing in it. Often these are included for the toyetic nature of them. Which isn’t bad, I’m just not sure if I will include something like that.

Most likely if I were to do anything like that I’ll probably use something like dreams or such. Why? Because I want to deliberately limit myself to a real world setting. With people that ‘could’ be real. Just to challenge myself in my writing and create actual compelling characters.

One of the most important factors is drawing my characters as often as I can in all sorts of positions. So this is what I did with Jay on this page. Without using reference (which is not a recommendation) I drew Jay in as many poses as possible. Apparently there was something of interest to the left, which is why they’re all looking that way.

One thing I love about Jay is how expressive he can get with those big eyebrows. Expression being a very key feature for characters in comics.

Also the Cthulhu in the top right is just a random bonus drawing. Felt like drawing him.

Not related to the comic I’m working on, but a random doodle I made at work. An intern is in a band called Striking Justice, a punk hardcore band. Ideal music for annoying the crap out of your parents and neighbors. Not my cup of tea in terms of music, but I couldn’t help myself to make fun of name.

It was also an excersize in making a horrible pun at the expense of their name.

It’s kind of fun to draw this stuff, so maybe I’ll make more.

The House Of Madness started like most webcomics did. I created a character very much based on myself with a knack for technology and an occult counterpart based on a really good friend of mine.

Threw in the mandatory woman and another flaky character based on yet another friend. All in all with the exception of Maron, everyone in the comic was based on someone in real life. Maron was just an amalgamation of how I saw women.

The jokes and adventures were mainly a riff on movie and game tropes.

So all in a pretty standard and perhaps somewhat unoriginal webcomic. This is not to say I didn’t have a blast making this comic.

However without properly worked out characters I quickly ran myself into walls. Even when I rebooted the comic it was still pretty hard to do stories right.

As the comic progressed Shazram moved more to the forground as being the main character. Which I honestly didn’t mind. At some I even regretted having a character named after my online nickname in it. I hated it, but I couldn’t very well remove him suddenly. He was part of the dynamic between the characters.

The comic did of course grow and evolve and somewhere along the line I dropped in Chessa. She was going to be the outsider to our culture, but I never really managed to get that going or work that out properly.

Eventually the great freedom that the comic has was also it’s problem. Too much was possible and the characters weren’t really going anywhere, thus I decided to slowly end the comic.

I do not regret ever starting the comic, and it has been a blast to make. Seeing it grow was a joy and it certainly taught me a great many things about drawing and writing.

Besides, we’re not out of the woods yet. Things are only going to get more maddening.

When working out these characters it’s important to draw them in all sorts of positions using reference.

These drawings were all made using reference. I wanted to create typical poses for them to be in so I could become comfortable with drawing them in various ways.

There’s one of these in every IT company if they have any hope of survival. The code guru. The one that can code in assembly, while blindfolded, tied to the back of a rabid wolverine.

Like each and every character for this comic, Rain started as just a doodle of a cross between Neil from the Young Ones and cousin It from the Addams Family. A friend pegged him as a the code guru and I liked that.

The name Rain McKnight came from the fact that it sounds cool. Originally his parents, or one of his parents, as going to be a latent hippy which explains his name. But recently whe deciding colors, I opted for an Asian tint for him. This immediately creates an interesting background, his last name obvious comes from his father who’s from Great Britain and his mother was most likely Asian which explains his name. However this does not explain his preference for coding.

Which is why his father is a traveling business man and his mother was dead. Without a lot of friends or attention he turned to computers. Resulting in an overly developed ability to code.

Personality wise I want him to be the most calm character in the comic. Where Jay is relaxed, Rain will always remain calm no matter what happens. This is partially caused by the fact that he has no facial expression. He can’t convey emotion and thus will always come across as very robotic. But that works, those guys exist, I’ve met them.

How Rain will further develop we’ll have to see.

This drawing was done when I was working on the competition comic. Who I sort of called Bob. This of course conjures up all sorts of images of Jay and Silent Bob with people. But in truth at this point I was very much inspired by SLC Punk. In which there was a character called Heroine Bob (who didn’t do drugs).

At the time I was toying with a two page story about two punks that generally sit around doing nothing. But a decent story never really formed so I tossed the idea and Jay got a solo adventure. Though he wasn’t named Jay at the time.

Interestingly this is part of the history of the development of the character. The current version doesn’t smoke, but it’s not beyond the realm of possible that he did at one point before starting his job.

As said, nothing is set in stone.

It is said that Akira Kurosawa wrote detailed biographies of each characters in his movie. Right down to their favorite food and color. Things which aren’t really relevant for the movie. But they do create a personality which reacts to situations in certain ways.

One of the things I want to do with this comic is do it as best I can. Part of that is preparing the characters as best I can. It should not be forgotten that people change and grow over time. But having a starting point helps greatly. For this reason I started to write down information about my characters in my notebook.

First up was of course Jay. While I wanted to avoid overt self insertion in this comic it is kinda obvious that Jay can find some of his inspiration in me. For this reason I wanted him to be slightly different from me where possible. Even then this list is not set in stone. Most likely his last name will change to something else as will his musical aspirations. This is something I haven’t decided yet.

For the most part this is a starting point. From here I can use this to write dialogs between him and the others to see where it goes. What sort of personality he has and how he reacts to others. We’ll meet the rest of the cast in the weeks to follow.

When last you read about my exciting life I had just finished an education in Technical Informatica.

By now I had started on an HBO eduction in Communication Multimedia Design. This was one of the first bridge educations between programming and design for multimedia purposes. It was a mishmash of design, webdevelopment, print design, multimedia creation (in MacroMedia Director) and a lot of marketing.

Through some internet chattery I had met someone who would have drawn the idea for a comic I had. But he was too busy to be able to and at some point I had fun ideas and scripts laying around that I decided to draw it myself. Of course I had horrible drawing skills and I was about twenty at the time. But with some decent books and determination I managed to improve my skill drastically over the past few year. In case you we’re wondering, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards is the shiznit in learning to draw.

At some point while I was still developing my skill I decided to jump into the fray with my comic in 2005. This version ran for a total of about fifty comics before I stopped. It used a bunch of different drawing styles and stories were a bit cramped due to flaky updating schedule. Somewhere when I stopped I was doing an internship at forty hours a week, a weekend job which also had evening slots, and karate training twice a week. It was no wonder I hardly had time to actually draw a comic of any kind.

In 2007 I decided to give it a new fresh start and rebooted the entire comic on December 31st. This started out fairly well but quickly ran into spotty updating schedules as I was also making a brave attempt at finishing school. For future reference, trying to write a thesis, starting your own business and doing a webcomic are all fine activities. Just not all at the same time. Somewhere something had to give which was more often than not the webcomic.

The business I started was doing websites to support my comic career. But it was getting in the way more and not actually making me enough money. So the decision was made to find a job. At the time I was dating the woman I’m currently living with and she moved to a city two hours driving away for school. Since I liked being with her I managed to find a job there, packed my things and moved there quite quickly. Still finishing school I was doing a full time job, getting settled and doing the comic. You can guess where this is going.

Since finishing school was in my best interest the comic game to a standstill as I worked on finishing school. Having succeeded at this I reinstated my comic and slowly built it up again until I went for a five day publishing schedule which I managed to maintain.

Next week the evolution of The House Of Madness and my desire to do new things.