Creating your own brand of comics like Strange Planet

“I chose to work without script or thumb-nails and used an A8 (shirt pocket) note-pad with (light) 60gsm paper. A4’s wide open space is agony to me and the comfortable intimate pocket-book suited my wish to develop a sporadic style. “Don’t Get Lost” was based largely on personal experience rather than research and so I could dive straight to work at any point in my day. My pencil work developed quickly to look confident. In one 24 hour session I unconsciously worked up thirty good pages in twenty-four hours. This didn’t happen creationist style, I’ve about twenty pages of shoddy, stumbling early work to prove it.”

“When designing my own webcomic the process went a little something like this: I designed the main characters, most of which were drawings that I had been playing with since high school. Then I needed a reason for them to constantly see each other and interact, so I got them living together. They needed character traits that I could relate to, so they become university-aged students that had at least a passing interest in the geeky side of life. I drew my first few strips and showed them to some friends, who liked them, so started looking into putting them online. [...] So I got rid of the frog, removed the focus on gaming and university and otherwise left the comic as it was. Not entirely original.”