A big part of writing is cutting out the unnecessary bits. That’s why I deleted my wordy intro to this post… 😉
I love to write. I’ve written a bunch of stuff over the years. Four entire comic mini-series that I never completed illustrating. Three sci-fi novels that I never finished (despite coming painfully close on the third). Even the storylines for two computer video games that I actually did some initial programming on. DtC in it’s current form is the third “start” at a strip-style cartoon. And of all this, it’s the only thing you could say I actually carried through on.
Here’s the weird part – all of these efforts (save the first novel and one video game) featured Penelope as the protagonist. Except in that seminal comic series, her name has always been Penelope Dreadful (it was originally “Rigby”), and she’s always been some variant on the same character. Why? I’ll leave that to the psychiatrists. Some visual representations of my prior Pennies can be found here: dropthecow.com/backstage/conception.
So, when I decided to see if I could still draw at all after years of neglect, I contemplated a few ways to work it into the story of Penny, Johnny, the Bobs, and the rest of the crew. What I came up with is the current storyline wherein Penny is introduced to the knowledge of an infinite number of worlds in which she exists, leading different lives – that is, the storied worlds inside my own brain where she is the common thread. In most of these, she’s a hacker. In some a comic artist, in some a musician. In others, a simple chibi-manga cartoon character. But always Penny.
To that end, each of these strips was drawn in a different style. Hopefully it’ll all make sense as we go along…
Enjoy! I did. So much so that I’m thinking of a limited edition print portfolio for the two-year anniversary. 😀
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