The Alternate Reality (1998)

Illustration

Ever since I was a little kid, I drew cartoons. I even had a weekly comic strip in the local newspaper when I was in high school. I always thought cartooning would be my career someday. Eventually I got into graphic design and advertising, but never lost my love of cartoons. As I got older, I wanted to see if I "still had it" and decided to create a new comic strip.

Finding an Angle

I didn't like the idea of creating a character and trying to keep an ongoing storyline that followed them through life. So my strip -- "The Alternate Reality" -- was sort of a parallel universe. It was kind of like Earth, but a little different. The focus of the strip were those strange exceptions which featured interesting takes on pop culture, quirky personalities and stuff that probably could happen (but doesn't).

Putting Pen to Paper

I had a notebook filled with rough sketches, half-baked concepts and visual rants. From them I would find the most promising and flesh them out a bit further to see if they held together in a strip format. The ones that did were penciled onto ruled Bristol board.

They were then inked with a croquill pen using a Hunt 107 nib with black India Ink. The finished ink drawings were scanned into Photoshop and all text and shading was added. The font for the text was created in Fontographer from my own handwriting.

Waking Up From the Dream

After creating a few dozen finished strips, I realized how much work it was. As much as I love this artform, it is A LOT of work. It's fun to do once in awhile, but I wasn't cut out to do this for a living. I gladly continued my day job secure in the knowledge that "what could have been" would never have happened.

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