Bad Machinery

New comics will be back on August 23rd. But this week, the Bobbins (2013-2022) archive is back up at scarygoround.com/bobbins. This was the series that revisited the setting and characters of my earliest strips  for all-new stories. Most of it was drawn during the time I was working writing series for US publishers. I would repeatedly approach burnout, so needed an easy project to work on to keep regular stuff going up. It would have been more sensible to stop making webcomics altogether, but I didn’t want to stop drawing.

The simplicity of these stories is quite cheering to me. The short form is very easy for me to work in, the economy of the dialogue forces you to cut any fat. I think there are lots of nice moments that I simply wasn’t capable of when I was originally making Bobbins in 1998-2002. This series might have continued to reappear periodically, but when I tried again in 2022, I drew 12 strips and didn’t run them. Publishing them felt like an admission of defeat – I could do better. The project felt like it had reached a natural end. I eventually put them up on my Patreon, and they’re now added to the end of the archive. In retrospect, they’re fine; silly comics, open-ended enough to point to another run, and another. But to all things a season!

For the rest of this week I’ll pick out a few favourite strips and run them here with commentary.

Note: if you want to read the original Bobbins archive, and bear in mind these are incredibly rough, early work, they’re all still up at Keenspot.