About a week or so ago I fixed up the CSS on this site and realized something rather important: I miss this comic. A lot has happened since moving out to California and one of those things involved putting an end to writing and drawing this saga of three (or four if you count ID) furry bipeds living together and going on adventures. There was also a wedding and a real “grown up” job that factored into my decision to quit. But now that things have started to settle down a bit more in my life, I have found myself thinking about coming back and starting this up again.
Stupid idea, amirite?
Maybe.
I do have a few concerns about starting up this comic, and they are the main reasons why I’m hesitant about returning. The first concern is that my skill has stagnated a bit. When I quit back in 2010, I was having a tough time getting backgrounds quite the way I liked. I could get all the characters framed up nicely, but then it would take me hours to try and figure out how to make the backgrounds make any sense. The result, of course, being random lines and colors in nonsensical patterns. I also could not figure out how to draw women for the life of me. What made this problematic is that I had added two rather interesting female characters that I wanted to flesh out (Apple and Darla). If you go back through the previous strips, you’ll notice that I cut the corners where I could and relied heavily on copy and paste to eek my way through the strips they made an appearance in. If I came back, I’d definitely need to improve on this or figure out what isn’t “clicking” for me. Kind of daunting, if you ask me.
Another concern – fairly obvious if you have heard me complain about anything lately – is the lack of time. The new job eats up almost all of it, and I have this aspiration to become a writer in the creative sphere. But perhaps comics are where my writing time should be spent. After all, Henry could use a bit more fleshing out in the writing department.
Final concern: all the technical stuff. I’m not very happy with the layout of the comic, other than it’s width of 660px by whatever height. I kind of came up with this layout on the fly and it allowed me to come up with six panels worth of content. Unfortunately, that meant that I couldn’t really get dialog heavy and the jokes kept falling in the “one panel to pause before punchline” thing that has become kind of a cop out. If I were to come back, I’d really need to lock this down or figure out more creative ways to do panels on a strip by strip basis. I could just go the QC route and have long panels going downward until the punchline.
I’m probably over-thinking this.
Henry On The Web