First Published: June 20, 2007
Witness the humble beginnings of a mediocre strip. The punchline is weak, the profile view is iffy and the hair is all over the place. So, overall it's a decent start.
The caption in the second panel went through several iterations. I refuse to worry how I ended up with a Scientology reference in the first strip. A couple of days after drawing this strip, I dreamt of a name, which had never happened to me before. The name was... Kelly Preston. On a hunch, I went straight to the iMDb and ended up finding, of all things, John Travolta's wife.
This comic strip was launched with next to no preparation – a few squiggles on a sketch pad and off we go. The main design decision was to draw the "me" character with stiff lines to represent his inner state and to leave the neck implied. It didn't take.
As soon as I started the first strip, I immediately made up a lot of internal "rules" which I even spelled out in the original "about" page of this site. Obviously, after about a dozen strips I found myself breaking all of the rules, one by one, and sometimes even in twos. So the rules are out of the window.
(Note: The punchline of this strip has been modified after publication. Trust me, it works better now.)