Posted by Pat at Friday January 2nd, 2009

#1 - Inspiration Strikes!

Hello and welcome to the beginning of How to Make a Sprite Comic in 8 Easy Bits! We're taking a page from Bob and George creator/writer/total-hack-or-webcomic-iconoclast-only-history-can-decide Dave Anez and switching on the archives' Creator Commentary tracks. If you're reading this you're probably an old bit here to revisit and learn more about the comic's earlier days or otherwise a first-time reader who probably has no idea what you're getting him/herself into. In either case, good for you! I hope these commentary boxes will prove entertaining and enlightening for you, and duly hope that writing them will help me come to understand what the hell it is I've created, and why the hell I can't seem to quit it.

8EB isn't my first comic. I'd been drawing comics intermittently since age five. Let's see if I can't remember some of them: first there were the crayon stick figure strips and minibooks about Lego spacemen and the blantant X-Men rip-offs (the main character's mutant power was turning into a anthropomorphic lizard and unleashing sonic waves; his girlfriend had fire powers and wore armor that looked like an antiquated deep dea diving suit). Then there were some colored pencil comics called "Godzilla's Modern Life" that I wish to god I'd kept, and my high school years were spent drawing a series of Roman Dirge and Jhonen Vasquez-inspired (re: ripped-off), semi-autobiographical strips. But sometime during my senior year of high school, the well dried up. I wasn't writing anything new or interesting, and I stopped drawing altogether by my first semester in college.

So it was sometime around late 2002 or early 2003. I was attending a New Jersey state college and majoring in English with the intent of becoming a high school teacher, although the whole thing was something I found myself indifferently stumbling into rather than deliberately choosing. I had no creative outlets except for RPG Maker and a few composition classes that couldn't rake up anything inspired or even worthwhile out of me.

Then an acquaintance IMed me a link to 8-Bit Theater. I was simultaneously introduced to the concepts of "web comics" and "sprite comic."






And so I became a webcomics fiend. My early favorites, aside from 8-Bit Theater, (listed in the order of my stumbling upon them) were VG Cats, Bob and George, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, 8-Bit College, and Kid Radd. I tore through each comic's archives in a matter of weeks, and then reread them at least once. My sitting down one day and deciding "I should give this webcomic thing a shot!" was inevitable.

It wasn't because I was lazy or because I didn't have faith in my drawing skills that I opted to do a sprite comic instead of a drawn one. I wanted to do what I saw and enjoyed most about 8-Bit Theater -- take all those Nintendo games that had such a massive impact on me during my seminal years (for better or worse) and use them as the raw materials for something new and yet familiar: a homage to and parody of the 8-bit years, and also a jab and a knowing wink at my fellow twenty-somethings in Generation Y who, like me, had practically been brought up by Mario, Sonic, and Liu Kang.

...Or maybe I just thought doing a sprite comic would be 133T. Who knows. This was all a very long time ago, remember.

(Hmm. 2003. If I recall correctly, this was around when the Retro Bomb went off, stagnating American pop culture and making nostalgia for the things of yesterday one of this decade's most defining characteristics. Well, fuck. Looks like I've actually been part of the problem all this time.)

But I digress. Anyway, my first idea for a sprite comic was to make a series of Greek myth parodies assembled from Final Fantasy sprites. I haven't the foggiest recollection of any specifics, although I do remember getting a little huffy when a friend to whom I pitched the idea said it didn't sound so hot. (She was right.)

So I was forced to resort to Plan B: winging it.

One spring afternoon I sat down, opened up Paint Shop Pro 3 and FCEU Ultra, and started ripping sprites and backgrounds from Maniac Mansion. The choice seemed obvious: it was one of my favorite NES games, I hadn't seen any other comics using it as a resource, and its realistic (relatively speaking) backgrounds and characters could be used to construct more convincingly down-to-earth scenarios than one could with, say, sprites from Metroid or Adventure of Link.

So, finally, let's have a gander at the comic strip itself. As you can see, it's ugly as hell. It's a real eyesore. Jesus Christ. I can barely look at this thing. First, there's the obvious issue of .jpeg blurring (a greenhorn mistake that even Anez and Clevinger made at first). Then there's the aliased dialogue balloons with no outlines. There's the girl's stupid-looking edited hair and misshapen, freakishly-large ear (which was actually Maniac Mansion's fault and not mine). And then there's the main characters' sprite, which I was too lazy/shortsighted to edit. The list goes on.

At any rate, here we're introduced to the Author and the Girl. The former obviously started out as a proxy for myself. The latter companion is either a proxy for my ex-girlfriend Vanessa (with whom I was still a little miffed at the time over a previous "dumping me" incident) or my own anima -- the the latent sensible female element of my own consciousness. I guess it kinda varies from strip to strip.

8EB kicks off the way pretty much every sprite comic does: the comic's author appears and announces that he is going to start making a sprite comic. Then there is a pause, followed by a self-deprecating joke that isn't really funny. I guess the only hook is that this time the author of the sprite comic is blithely and ironically unaware that he's actually a character in someone else's sprite comic.

Yeah, sure. It blows my mind too.

This comic was drawn and reposted as 8 Easy Bits 2003 Re-Bout, a tepid spoof of SNKP's hi-res redressing of King of Fighters '94. The joke is that NONE of the objects involved are actually any good. Yeesh.

(I promise that most of these commentary boxes will be shorter than this.)