For the last few years I have been teaching ‘Writing for Comics’ at Portland State University (often co-teaching with my dear friend, Brian Michael Bendis). For the class mid-term the students are required to create their own web comic. After years of telling students to make a web comic, I decided to create my own, which resulted in my short-lived comic strip DISCOMBOBULATED. You can read the strips on Webtoons.
I wrote and published thirty-seven DISCOMBOBULATED strips, until I allowed life, other work, and silly rationalizations to get in the way of keeping the strip alive. Nearly a year ago, I posted the last strip, and planned on taking a hiatus for a few months (but honestly, I was deluding myself). Well…that hiatus lasted much longer than anticipated, and I’ve been kicking myself in the ass this entire time. Honestly, I loved writing DISCOMBOBULATED. Yes, it was a challenge, and it probably took up too much time, but it was also one of the most creatively fulfilling projects I’ve done in years. And yet I stopped doing it. I could offer all kinds of excuses, like the fact that it wasn’t generating any income, but at the end of the day, it still ends the same – I willingly stopped doing something I enjoyed, and then proceeded to beat myself up for not doing (a classic sign of chronic depression if there ever was one).
All of that said, I’m pleased to announce that I will be relaunching DISCOMBOBULATED later this year, in the first week of December. I’m waiting until December so that I can create a back-log of strips, and not have to rush every week to make sure I have something to post. In the meantime, here is a special treat – I had started developing an off-shoot of DISCOMBOBULATED, tentatively called DROPPIN’ KNOWLEDGE. I did a few test strips, but was never happy with any of them. Here’s a look at one of the versions I created as a test.
