A New Experiment: Legend of Helga

Legend of Helga, written and illustrated by yours truly

Sooo...

I've decided to try something more. I thought I'd add webcomic to the ever growing list of things I do. Drawing comics has been something I've wanted to do since at least elementary school, when I did a strip that was a pretty bad rip-off of Charlie Brown called "Stick People". In the past few years I've had a couple of false starts in actually creating and finishing a comic (be it meant for the web or otherwise). Since I've recently been doing a fairly good job of booting myself in the butt to do things and have habits, I figured it was time to try again.

This time I took stock of what always seemed to tie up the other comic projects and killed them.

One is writing, I was always dead set on telling an original story, so I always had writing hang-ups that would end up in not writing at all because it wasn't perfect. For this go-round, I decided to just tell an old story in what hopefully is a new way. Legend of Helga is about a girl taken from  her home world to save another world from and evil organization of magic users, which sums up the plot of every B-grade sword and sorcery film.

Another hang-up was panel lay-out, believe it or not. The comics I read growing up were all in the newspaper so I tend towards a page of rectangles rather than anything interesting. I was also always either trying to cram too much action into one panel or I'm spreading it out over to many and it really messed with pacing. So in drawing Legend of Helga, I did away with the panel format. What resulted was something halfway between a comic book and a storybook. I think it's a good mutant, but only time will tell what horrible creation I may have unleashed on the unsuspecting public.

I also had a tendency towards overly-complex character designs. Some people can do this, but after a few pages I would be artistically worn out and never want to draw those characters again. Legend of Helga's characters are pretty much various geometric-shapes on top of fleshed-out stick figure bodies. The result is a cast I (so far) love to draw (knock on wood). I also gave Helga a feature I don't like (her pointy nose), which oddly had been more pleasurable to work with than all the softer-featured women I've tried to work with in the past.

Currently, Legend of Helga updates once a week on Thursdays. I'll keep upping the update-frequency as I learn what kind of schedule I can deal with. I'd love to someday get to the point of daily posts, but that's still a ways off. Right now my goal is to maintain a regular update schedule for a year.

So if I've piqued your interest, your can check out the first page here: Legend of Helga

And if while you're there, you'd like to show your support you can click on the TWC button and vote for my newest endeavor, I'd be ever so grateful.