dotCommentary:I.N.M

As promised here is the first of the dotCommentary series looking at past comics from the point of view of John, Myself or both. This week as its the first one we've both contributed something to the post and I hope you enjoy it.

As its not strictly a blog post viewing of it is optional so to see it youll have to click the title above , or the read more link below.
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First up is I.N.M which stands for infinite number of monkeys, which is a play on the theorem that, amongst others, led Emile Borel to remark that given an infinite number of monkeys, typewriters and an infinite amount of time you would eventually receive, legibly typed, the entire works of Shakespeare.

The second aspect of this comic is that of ER software, a large multinational conglomerate developer and publisher of games in no way similar to any current business in practice or design, honest. ER are known for, amongst other things as you will see shortly, the yearly "updates" to franchised sports games, which never really improve so much as iterate and this comic is an attempt to perhaps explain why this is the case, and why one day perhaps W.Shakespeare from Warwickshire will be playing upfront for Liverpool.

The final thing of significance of this comic is that it marks the first "official" dotGif collaboration between myself an John, but not the first comic we have made together, more on that another time perhaps.

T/K

I.N.M. was the last comic I released properly using the old art style. Before I bought myself a graphics tablet, comics were made using the pen tool in Photoshop. Anyone who has used the tool will know its difficult enough as it is, to make even coherent 'blobs', let alone craft characters/programming simians with it. Needless to say, it took a lot of time, and a lot of messing around with layers, merging, erasing and redrawing. One of the main advantages, however, is it gives a very neat line art layer - tidying up the comic - but, I feel that the dimensions of the image were too large to have such a small line, making the characters seem 'lost' in the image, because the image was either too big, or the lines were too narrow.

I, as an artist, was changing [wow, deep]. I felt more compelled to make rough, untidy images, that still gave a clear value about what was being shown, and I wanted the characters to be more 'cartoony' [I hate that word], so I redrew the main characters, and developed an art direction that made the comic a little more distinct. So, the lineart changed, the characters changed and I resized the comics physical shape to be a little more user-friendly (now 600px wide instead of I.N.M's 750px) and ended up making a comic about a suit that generates kittens. Kittens of joy.

JB