Nismorack.com

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.

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.