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If you’ve ever cracked open the comics section of your local newspaper (assuming your newspaper editors are the type to pass on the story about Uncle Earl getting stuck in the outhouse), you’ll notice that most strips focus on a) ungodly Hell spawn in the forms of families that NEVER age no matter what or b) talking animals. Most of them play with safe, non-offensive jokes that have been recycled over the years from other comics and have decent artwork.
We’ve got one of those three. It’s my privilege to introduce you, the reader, to the wonderful world of Bug, a comic strip about a dog named Tucker, otherwise known as Bug, who lets us into the world as he sees it. Bug was created by Selmek and is based off of the exploits of his dog of the same name. The comic strip is a fascinatingly inspired creation, born when Selmek, in a characteristic artistic fervor, was bored out of his mind and started doodling. Over Christmas of 2005, Selmek came back on leave and we decided to hit the town, where we did perfectly innocent, Christian-approved activities that did not involve adult bookstores. During our binge, he nonchalantly took a folded piece of paper of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me, explaining that he was bored and did some comics about his dog. I looked over the original strips and was thrilled with the idea. When we were in fifth grade all the way to high school, we used to do comics about super heroes, plus an entire series about his sister, which were so entirely immature that we’ll be laughing at them well into our retirement. They were about at the same artistic level as a preschool art class and the stories reflected the attention span of our pre-adolescent minds, but they were still a fun to do, and it seemed to be happening again. As far as art goes, not much changed with Bug, but the simplistic art style actually added charm to the affair. The jokes were very inside and a bit morbid, but I saw some potential in the strip on the web, so I ran the idea past Selmek. He replied, quite passionately, “Okay.” So I got to work taking the strips into the computer and redrawing them to clean them up. I tried to retain the rough style, mostly because it was easier to cut corners, but also to let the comic keep its charm without looking like it was scrawled on an idle piece of computer paper that was left lying around by a bored military employee. And no offense to Selmek, who is an excellent writer who deserves several expensive book deals, but the jokes also needed some work to make them more accessible to the general audience while retaining their insider origins. We will continue to come up with more Bug in the coming months and years. |