Every day you log onto stickcat, you see the final product of everyone here at stickcat’s work.  What you don’t see is what happens behind the scenes, past the html coding and beyond the layers upon layers of photoshop work.  Today we would like to give you, the fanboy, an inside look into how the comic you all love and worship is made.

Step 1: Coming up with ideas.

Now, a lot of artists tend to turn to drugs for inspiration.  Jason and Fritz are different- they don’t use drugs.  Instead, to start a brainstorming session they usually stop taking their Ritalin 3 days in advance.  The brainstorming sessions continue until we’ve got some usable ideas or until we’ve been hit with injunctions forcing us to put both Fritz and Jason back on their meds by court order.

Step 2: Drawing the comic.

Fritz usually likes to start off with a rough sketch.  For this reason, stickcat corporate shelled out the dough to get him the big 64 ct. Crayola crayon box.  Then, Jason usually looks at the sketch and just draws something completely irrelevant to the comic at hand on his computer using Microsoft Paint.  At this point, often just stickcat and the other character (I never bothered to learn their names) appear in the comic.  That’s generally when I hold Jason up at gunpoint and force him to include the evil day moon.  I’ve only had to actually shoot him twice.  Sometimes, the comic panels get mixed in from a couple different comics but we just say the hell with it and throw it onto the web site anyway.

A warrior is only as good as his weapon

Step 3:  Adding comics to the web page.

This is where 99% of the real work begins.  You might think that html coding is entirely logical and obeys normal, set rules.  In addition to making me laugh uncontrollably, you would be wrong.  We managed to add the first couple comics by accident.  No one remembers what happened or how we did it.  Jason and I were up one night until the birds were chirping when we figured it out.  We captured a young girl and offered her soul to our dark lord Satan, and now the comics add themselves to the web page!

Step 4:  Writing the user blog.
The other bloggers and I stare at the comics for hours until our eyes bleed and inspiration strikes- often at the same time.  After we get back from the hospital, we start writing, usually in an incoherent scrawl similar to “They are coming” in Lord of the Rings.  We then post it to the website wear it weights to be approved until the blog czar pops online weeks after the article was written and timely.  (Editors note: I refuse to fix these for you Steve.) Katie has to proofread it, keeping a watchful eye to brutally erase all split infinitives and make certain we end sentences correctly, never with prepositional phrases.  After the blog is posted, we obsessively refresh the website until the first delicious comment / hatemail appears.

Tags: behind the scenes, making of

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.