ShortCircuited

Here it is, the post i’ve long procrastinated.

So after many days of hard work, I’ve finally finished the first panel of the first comic of what will become the short-circuited series. As soon as I make some finishing touches, I’m going to trace my sketch, scan it, and send it over to Sam for some inking and maybe colouring.

The idea of Short-Circuited started some time towards the end of the second school term when the bunch of us got together to study for our finals. (Naturally, our productivity left a lot to be desired.) I believe it was Jon who first brought up the idea of starting up a web comic. We were no strangers to the world of web comics as we’ve all visited these websites frequently. (peticularly Penny-Arcade, which I’ll admit has a heavy pressence in my comics) Since Sam refused to acknowledge that he has the artistic potential to take up the challenge, I would take his honourable place. The night before my Calculus final, the very first sketch was created on the back of my calculus notes. It a series of conversations between Sam, Jon, and an employee of Blizzard Entertainment. A week later on the night before my anthropology final, the second sketch was made featuring Sam and Mellisa Melissa, and with some rather violent results.

Surprisingly, I failed 2 courses that term.

Eight months later, as the finals are once again approaching, we purchased this website. Slowly we got this website up and started to add some blog entries. During those eight months i’ve made numerous sketches, mostly of character concepts. (a few on stickies notes while I was at work)

These pictures contain the character concepts for Sam and Jon. You can see part of the tracing process done using Illustrator.

Here is a picture of Sam having a conversation with some sort of robotic laundry machine, presumably from Japan. (Personally, I never understood those space-age people)

The original plan for the comics were to have each of the characters be based on their real life counter parts. Recently, however, I’ve desided against that, for the following reasons.

1. I’ll admit it, I’m a lousy artist. None of my characters that i’ve come up with actually look like who they are supposed to be. Everytime I showed the portrayal of myself to Melllisa, she confused it with sam’s character. (even though i think we look sufficiently different)
2. If I base the characters completely on the real life counterparts, I will be tempted to make inside jokes. That wouldn’t be very funny now, would it.
3. I thought that a numbered list with only two bullets is a little pathetic. I’m sure I’ll remember to put something here later.