We'll I hope you enjoyed that. As you can see I cheated slightly (more than slightly) to get the full 24 pages done in 24 hours. The biggest being on pages 14-18. They're the same I just cut and pasted him farther down the page. It was a great time saver.
I lettered the comic on my computer using » Active Images fonts. The specific ones being Wild and Crazy International and the Wild and Crazy SFX. When I did it I expected the lettering to go faster, but since I had to scan in the pages and then do the lettering it took much longer than expect. Computer lettering has its place, but I think for now I have to use it sparingly.
The whole idea for the comic actually started from the cover page. I had sketched that out several months to a year before I did this comic. I got the idea from Art Spiegelman's Maus II1 on page 41 in the last panel he is leaning on his drawing table and in the foreground there are gaunt bodies piled on the floor. It almost appears as if the desk is sitting on top of them. Then the cover of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha2 and then on page 257, gave me the finishing touches of light shining down from the sky. I had planned on having more bodies, but I was under a deadline. The idea being that we are reborn and the Buddhist belief that our past actions affect our current life. So, when you die your actions determine what your next life will be, or the way I depicted it you are really building upon your previous lives.
This comic didn't end the way I expected, from the beginning I expected to do a serious comic and then at page 10 I was sure that was over. The Lemming Building just seemed like a good idea. I guess childhood memories of the old video game, and a local radio station (105.7 The Point, circa 1992) had a commercial talking about lemmings running off cliffs to their doom. Then at the last second the lemming turns around and the voice over says "Don't be a lemming."
Or something to that effect.
Looking back at this there are still things that I find humerous. Like the angel rent-a-cop, and heaven having a NO VACANCY sign.
One last thing, for those of you who like the movie Office Space you noticed the reference to the TPS reports on page 7. Well, just recently I learned what TPS stands for: Transactions Per Second. It's something I never really gave any thought to while watching the movie.
1. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: a survivor's tale, II: and here my troubles began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991
2. Tezuka, Osamu. Buddha Volume 1: Kapilavastu. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2003