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It seems like only yesterday I was working on this page. But… looking at the date, amazingly, it was 2 and-a-half years ago. Stick-Man and I were coming off a very long hiatus. Heck, I think the last comic I had written or illustrated with Stick-Man in it was my first attempt at self-publishing print comics in 1999 and 2000.

I really didn’t know where I wanted to go with the character for this comic. Traditionally, he was a humorous character, but, if you read those 2 books from ’99 and ’00 you know that I was really trying to push him into more of a dramatic role. I think that whole concept stalled because, whether I could acknowledge it at the time or not, it just wasn’t right for him. If you didn’t read those books, take my word for it (if you feel like you HAVE to read those books, they’ll be up for sale shortly).

Stick-Man was put on the shelf for the next 7 years while I slept around with other concepts and characters knowing, in the back of my head, that he and I would get back together at some point when I had matured a little bit and realized that our destinies were actually tied together (that sounds HOT!).

Like I said, I had no idea where this concept was going to go I just knew that Stick-Man had his own voice and it was ridiculous of me to try and make him speak any other way. He’s not Kevin Conroy’s terse Batman from the old Batman: The Animated Series, he’s not Marvel’s Merc with a Mouth Deadpool… he’s Stick-Man. Like Popeye, he is what he is and that’s all that he is. And I realized that the best way to write a comic about him was just to let him talk to me and write it down.

And that’s what this is. I was drawing, he showed up and everything was like old times.

You will notice however, that… there is still some evolution taking place with the way his head is actually shaped. Originally he had a head that was coin shaped and that lasted through the ’99 and ’00 books. When I started sketching him out for this reboot, that head just didn’t feel right and I decided to bring him a little bit closer to the real world. I’ve since been shaping and nudging that pale yellow dome trying to figure out exactly what the heck it looks like.

The other note about this page is that I really don’t care too much for drawing backgrounds. There, I said it. The elephant in the room can go to hell. My art is what it is and I’m totally cool with it. If there’s a way I can cheat or work around drawing a background I’m doing it. Nothing slows me down more than having to plot out perspective or find reference for what the underside of my drawing desk looks like (another piece that constantly changes from page to page).

I’m totally envious of artists that seem like they ENJOY drawing chairs and houses and barbed wire fences. As a reader *I* find myself spending a lot of time admiring those details, because I know how much it sucks to draw them. The AVERAGE reader doesn’t even NOTICE those details, trust me. You can spend 47 hours on a page drawing each individual tooth pick in the tooth pick jar and the reader is going to spend the amount of time it takes to read the dialogue and then TURN THE PAGE. Congratulations awesome background artist, you could have been playing “Just Cause 2!”

More about my thoughts on backgrounds (don’t get me wrong, they are totally necessary) as we go through these pages.

Alright, one FINAL note about this page. It’s the first time Stick-man has ever been in color (I think). Through his High School, College and ‘99/’00 versions he was always in black and white. Once I made the decision to do this page in color, I had to make decisions about what colors he was. When the character was first created back in High School, it was written and illustrated on a rotating, panel-to-panel basis (a “circular comic” if you will) by myself and 2 other guys (Matt Bellucci and Jack Laiho). Jack colored a page at some point and made Stick-Man’s head a pale yellow color and I told him he was a moron (Jack is a physics professor at the University of Glasgow). “Stick-Man’s head is OBVIOUSLY white (you know, the color of the paper the comic was drawn on)” I said. But, once I started to color him in, I realized, Jack was right (about Stick-Man’s head color, I querstion his opinions on light as both a particle and a wave): pale yellow was the only thing that looked right.

Also worth noting: Jack and I got the same score on the S.A.T.’s the first time we took them. Had I taken a different path you would be reading my blog about the Reliability of Liquid Core Optical Waveguides for Sensitive Optical Absorption Measurements of Trace Species in Water (and boobs).