Teens and Tweens

Reading Days ended because the Teen Newsletter needed the space, but it was getting a little difficult to write because some topics were too irrelevant to fit the structure. When I was asked to do a new strip for the newsletter I wanted to give myself a framing device with a lot of freedom. The setting of Lightyears is the Demeter, a ship that could be designed to be modular, meaning I could introduce different spaces to allow for gags on different topics. The setting also allows for some story event if I am so inclined, I just need to have the crew encounter something, like pirates or something.

A lot of the Lightyears cast are characters from my other works. Most of the Reading Days crew is onboard such as Reginald and Intern Moon here.

These early strips are hard to write because there is a lot of world building we need to do in order to set the stage for the gags to come, and that doesn’t leave much room for jokes. That’s why you don’t often see a setup like this in something like a newspaper comic strip. If you have a universally understood premise, like being a kid or having a cat you can hit the ground running.

I make comics with a hybrid method, meaning I do half the work on paper, scan it, and do the rest on a tablet. My local art store stopped selling non-photo blue pencils around the time I made this comic and started selling non-photo purple. Non-photo blue allows your pencil marks not to be picked up when you scan in black and white. I couldn’t get the purple to do the same. So, this is the comic where I developed a new transfer technique that does not require me to remove pencil lines from the initial scan at all.

And yes, that one dwarf is just Dr. Robotnik.

This works as gag, but it also opens a door for me to include gags about existing video games in this setting, as opposed to restricting me to high fantasy VR fiction like what you’d see in Ready Player One, Snow Crash, or Star Trek.

Like most web cartoonists I got my start in video game comics. I don’t recommend doing that because anything you do will be an inside joke. Case in point, if you haven’t played Dave the Diver, Dave finds mayo while diving deep under sea.

Have you noticed that uniforms and rooms are color coded? That made designing the engine room a little tricky because there needed to be lights and doodads with contrasting colors.

This robot is named A1-H@Z3N, or A1 for short. He’s named after the father of modern optics, Hasan Ibn al-Haytham. Anyway, cats can get real creative in their mayhem when they want to be fed, right?

Reginald’s redesign for Lightyears took some experimentation. Using his original circle design was tempting, but incorporating the Demeter uniform was tricky and not something I’d likely be able to fit into all panels. Then there was the question of his hands and number of legs. Interestingly enough the decision I feel made him come together is in this comic where his eyes moved from the front of his head to the sides.