Comics By Kleefeld

I was fumbling through some archives and came across the source file for my entry into a contest Dark Horse held back in 2000. I don't recall the specifics, but it was basically that you had to tell/show that you were Dark Horse's #1 fan. Here's my entry...

Not surprisingly, I didn't win.

I think that entry, though, is what prompted me to start some Fred Hembeck-style issues reviews.

You know, I've been told repeatedly over the years that I should do my own comic strip. (I was told today, in fact!) But back in 2000 was the only time I seriously entertained the notion for any period. My first problem is that I don't think I'm that good an artist; it takes me WAAAY too long too get something decent-looking, I think. My second problem is that I'm not very good when it comes to writing fiction. Hence, the cartoon above and the reviews I posted earlier are more opinion-based than anything. That doesn't mean I couldn't do an autobiographical or opinion-based comic, of course, but I'm much more effective at communicating those types of ideas in a written form like this.

That said, I did toy with the idea of doing a webcomic back in 2000. The idea I had was that I would just relay stories from my life. Mostly fairly short vignettes, and they would not necessarily run in chronological order. One week might be a strip about when I was five, the next might be some event from college, the one after that might be something from high school. In addition to "traditional" webcomic navigation, I'd also have available a timeline, so that readers would have the option to read the story in order of how the events happened or in order of how I happened to write/draw/post them. The name I had picked out -- which I still kind of like -- was Tacit Provenance.

I did go so far as to develop part of a logo for it (see right) but I never did any actual strips. I believe I concluded that there's no way I'd develop any sort of audience for it, and it would eat up crudload of time, given that the handful of previous strips I had done showed that I wouldn't be able to update more than once a week.

I still like the name, and there's a couple things going on in that da Vinci rip-off that I'm surprised I pulled off with any degree of success, but I'm still fairly certain that's not a path I should bother pursuing.

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