Humour is serious business

Ok, so I’ve begun attempting to somewhat-regularly produce a comic strip. It’s kinda hard writing any of the stuff for it.

Sure, funny things happen in real life but when you’re trying to create a joke it’s nearly impossible. The spontaneity is totally gone, although it may appear to look that way when one reads the strip. I see my type of personal humour to be reliant on timing and verbal. Quick-wittedness, if I dare say so myself.

Of course, saying that about myself just makes me sound like even more of a wanker than I normally do. That’s just how I perceive my style, I guess.

In order to make things a little easier for myself when the not-often-enough-urge comes to abuse MSPaint and create a new strip, I keep a file with little ideas for things that I find funny or quotes/dialogue I’ve had with people for inspiriation. It’s not very long at the moment but I haven’t added to it in a while.

The medium I’ve chosen for my comic isn’t particularly subtley-friendly, either. I traded off ease-of-creation for detail by using sprites instead of hand-drawing images. Perhaps I can start doing random comics without using set characters but I’d still have to create them. I made the decision to go with pre-drawn sprites as I figured that while I’m travelling and in random net cafes, access to decent image editing programs would be limited and any precision mousework would probably be difficult. Of course, I could be mistaken.

I could always just bury it and forget it ever happened. Admittedly, I tend to only make a comic when I’m bored, not because I really want anyone to read it (I don’t even have an abstractly-idealised target audience for it, apart from maybe sharing it with some friends for a chuckle here and there).

Still, I’ve learnt a few things along the way.