One hundred and ninety
THE BOBBINS (2013-2022) ARCHIVE IS BACK UP!
The revival of Bobbins amounts to 250 comics over nine years. This one from later in the run illustrates the strength it had gained by this point, but also the seeds of its destruction. It was meant to be an easy fill-in that I could knock out at a rate of two strips a day if I needed to. If you can draw ten strips a week and you’re running four a week, that’s an easy way to build up a big buffer and rest for a while.
But I can’t draw two strips like this a day. Due to the gains in my technical ability that had come from writing Giant Days, and being able to ask an artist to draw pretty much anything (because in the case of the artists I worked with, they could), I had begun to ask more difficult visual questions of myself as an artist too. This strip is complicated. There are 17 distinct figures in it and multiple picture planes. At this level of complexity, I am effectively cramming a whole full-size page into panels that are too small. It’s not a nice, concise little strip. It’s an exercise in compression. I was compromising my efforts in the name of format, having lost sight of simplicity.
This is the sort of byway you can find yourself going down when you aren’t looking closely at what you’re doing, and these stories were improvised with the barest of guiding notes. It’s most likely the reason that a lot of webcomics of the 2000s begin with two guys on a sofa playing video games, and five years later, feature the same guys staring into a spiralling void with an HR Giger monster coming out of it, trying to save the timestream, as part of a story called “Chronicle Odyssey IV: A Change”. We all did it. Some of those people never came back.
I do like this story though, about Tim’s stupid band playing a gig at the wrong sort of venue, and I like how it’s drawn, and I like the line “DOG DIRT SONGS” because it’s profoundly stupid. I still think the drawing is some of my best. But I came to understand that it was a waste of energy, putting all this good stuff into a fill-in that reworked old comics, in a format that I couldn’t print in a way I found satisfactory. I’d mastered the format, but the format was from 1998. A couple of months later, after doing a Ryan story that I really wanted to do, in 2020 I called time on Bobbins.
If you’ve not read the 12 (heretofore) unpublished strips from 2022, have a look!
An interesting look at what you were doing and why you stopped doing it. Obviously, doing web comics is not as simple as it looks.
Cartooning is actually very, very hard. Anyone who doubts this should try it.
HA!!!! Tupping Liberty!!!! That used to be his go-to phrase for “Shit is getting real, fella’s”
Twenty years ago I had a yellow tee with an anarchist toaster on it, emblazoned with this catch phrase. Sold by John of course. I can’t find any record of the shirt though, and the Yahoo email account I would have used purchasing it is lost to the sands of time, so who is to say that this memory isn’t just the random firing of neurons induced by a passing vape fog.
oho!
Thank you, m. This was a hammer of nostalgia. I also had the Tupping Liberty tee (so it was certainly not imagined), and either owned or coveted the others.
Were there ever actually real-life versions of Lottie and Mimi’s “SOD MOD” and “Nostalgia is a drug” shirts? I thought I remembered them, but I went looking on Topatoco when the strip came up in the GoComics rerun of “Modern Men”, but could only find Claire’s “You’re all too tall!” shirt.
There was never a SOD MOD shirt, nostalgia is a drug may have been designed but was probably not produced.
You skipped one of my favourites. The “Does my fringe make me look like Dave Hill from Slade?” Shelley as Superyob!
More seriously, thank you, John, this whole strip was immaculate. I will have a smile on my face for days.
I like this storyline because it gave us Tim’s “cousin” Ljubjana!
“One day you’ll find an independent woman covered in childish scribble who’ll stay the course.”
Hmm. I just recalled that Amy’s tattoos started as a Shelley idea that Shelley herself backed out of, and Shelley was the one who encouraged Ryan and Amy to get together at the end of SGR. Was she plotting to fulfill her own prophecy all along?
Your summary of the trajectory of webcomic artists is spot on. To be fair, I think it often applies to novelists, directors, TV writers, musicians etc. equally well. Start off doing something modest, bounded, charming, then get notions and/or pressure to produce more, and end up with something spiralling, grandiose and, ultimately, boring. A hard trap to avoid I’m sure!
If Watterson is any indication, you gotta find a way to pace yourself so you’re not doing an ungodly amount of work, and then quit when you’re ahead.
In creative work that’s performative, there’s an almost unbounded amount of time you can spend creating things that are ‘so and so much better’ — to top it off, the default webcomic format is ‘free’, emulating everyone’s experience growing up when their parents payed for the newspaper subscription.
Always have appreciated John’s work… I think the real trajectory for webcomics has always been something like cashing out your audience and fame into something else, like a convention, game, foundation… which sucks because in fact most of us just would like to read some good comics, which is the whole reason we started reading these.
It’s definitely true John that this comic strip is way too complex, although it’s done really well so that it doesn’t feel off. But as a person who has drawn comics for extended periods of time, a strip concept that involves very complex visuals isn’t going to really fit the three-to-four panel three-to-six days a week format. Being able to pull it off would be like memorizing and being able to play the whole King Crimson ouevre live, an amazing feat but one that doesn’t make sense economically, unless one has come upon some unexpected fortune.
I think a big part of it also is perspective and managing to maintain it – realising (or just knowing through strength of character or stubbornness) what’s good about your work, and keeping that in sight while continuing, growing, expanding etc. Knowing who’s just blowing smoke up your ass, as they say, who’s just being overly critical for reasons of bitterness, jealousy, japes (these are the two default positions on social media) and who’s in the middle and might actually have a measured view. Being able to keep in touch with what got you started in the first place, keep your eye on the point on the horizon you’re aiming for and steering a true (but flexible) course towards it. Easy as that!
How To Make A Small Fortune As A King Crimson Cover Band? Start with a large fortune.
I remember being delighted for days by the idea of a group of grown men earnestly calling themselves the “Tin Star Troubadours.” Bobbins provided such cheer over its reboot run
Oh yeah, so when I was making up character sheets for the characters in the ill-fated barbarian story, I built Shailey as a bard, figuring her primary “instrument” was storytelling. But the Bard career gives a free musical instrument. I gave her a drum because of this storyline, the next couple of strips specifically.