I Gots Style

Something I have noticed my tastes leaning towards is a particular style of illustration. I have termed this style "Candy" for no other reason than my inability to come up with a better one-word description. I feel that SPeCks comes close to this style, but not completely. I also feel that SPeCks is actually a development of my own style, though it shares some commonalities with the "Candy".

Good examples of "Candy" are: butternutsquash, Snackbar-Games, scoab. These are a ridiculously small handful of examples that sorta fit into the genre. There are countless icons that are done in styles similar, if not dead on, to what I am talking about. Describing it is difficult for me, the best I can do is point it out when I see it. It's rounded corners, good (and appropriate amounts of) shading, bright colors, lots of colors, extra colors... It's cartoony. It's juicy. It's fun. It's "Candy"!

Allow me to bore you with the details concerning the origins of SPeCks. The comic sprung to life from a doodle on page 157 of S03 (that's my third sketch book). That doodle spawned another doodle. And another, and yet another. When I say doodle, I mean tightly inked drawings using a T-806 template (those green architect stencils). They were cute little spiders (though spiders are far from cute) and they deserved a story. This all happened on July 17, 2003. [SIDENOTE: Oddly enough, I had not yet gotten into online comics. I actually didn't know about the ones I read now (MegaTokyo, Alpha Shade, among others) until a couple of months ago. I read all of MegaTokyo the first day I discovered it. :END SIDENOTE] Once I had the drawings, I immediately began working on the characters and story. After I got most of the characters figured out, I realized there wasn't even a Bazooka Joe comic of a story. I had nothing, bubkis, nada, zilch, the big round goose egg of squat. I wanted a story and not necessarily 4-panel skits. To be honest, I probably should have gone with the skits. Not to mention, I only had black & white line art for the comic and no ideas on how I was to actually produce them. Well, "Candy" came to mind for the basic look and doing a comic online seems to be the fad of choice lately. With some extra touches by moi, SPeCks gets produced at least once a week.

Elsewhere, badgers are all the rave (if you don't know, please return to your cozy rock): Footy, Footy, Footy