Commentary: This mid-2005 toon is significant (to me at least) in that it features Dr. Panacea’s first appearance as a barber. Apparently in the old days doctors cut people’s hair, and way back when my former co-writer Geoff came up with the idea for a character who was a doctor of everything — including hair. Other than that, this strip is pretty average, though I do like SkitZo’s pose and the good doctor’s response. Why does he have birds in his barbershop, anyway? Well… he is a doctor of everything, I guess…

Commentary: Originally posted on SkitZo’s site in mid-2005, I think “crab dip” is what takes this strip from kind-of funny to really funny… Hooper’s doing, of course. I think the art and colors turned out pretty good, but the letter leaves much to be desired.

Commentary: Mid-2005. This one was pretty simple, artistically, which is okay. But SkitZo’s head looks a little off-model and misshapen. I do enjoy the fact that he suddenly has lips when required. I wrote this one (not Geoff) which is why it’s not as funny as some of the others. Meh.

Good advice, though, don’t you think?

I’ve gotten way behind schedule on the SkitZo MaN Archives. Which is kind of sad, since the strips themselves were done years ago. The ones in this particular set were done in 2005, the first one being a re-make of a high school (‘93-ish) original, and the other two being new at the time. I was doing some of my own gags by this time, hence Geoff not getting credit on the latter two… Although I can’t be sure, since they didn’t actually have the credits on them until I updated them recently (sorry Hoop!).

As for my thoughts on how they turned out, I think the first one is just so-so. I like the clean design of the second one, though, and the colour on the third. That one’s also significant because it’s the first appearance of SkiZo MoM. Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure that Geoff must have helped write that one; it has too many layers of humour to have been just me. I’d go back and fix it again if I was more ambitious. Also, I should have posted it on Mother’s Day…

Commentary: Originally posted sometime in 2005, this one got out of sequence somehow and ended up in SkitZo MaN Book One even though some stuff that came before it didn’t. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that all I had to go on from my former co-writer Geoff was the one-liner “all talk and no traction”. Add some Canadian sports humor and voila — cheap joke.

Art-wise, I like the perspective on this one. Nice to shoot it from a different angle for a change. I also like my use of Photoshop’s shape tool to make the circles instead of trying to draw them by hand. Over all, a pretty cleanly-drawn and colored strip. Not a lot I would change if I did it now, other than the lettering; not a big fan of my hand-drawn word balloons or the font choice of Comic Sans.

Commentary: It’s almost the end of the year! Don’t forget to save organize your tax receipts!

OK… this was not one of my best ones. But it was 2005, and I was new at this whole “writing jokes without Geoff” thing. I kind of like the accountant though. And having PEZ in your comic can’t be a bad thing, can it?

I just realized that this is actually the second tax-related SkitZo MaN joke. The first can be seen HERE.

Commentary: This one first went live in ‘05, but was actually a re-make of one of our high school and/or college era strips. I seem to remember it being one of the ones that people didn’t quite get on first reading… which kind of makes me like it all the more, delightfully contrived pun that it is. Hooper, I salute you.

Visually, I think this one turned out pretty nicely. I like the single-tear-crying bush in the background. The lettering, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. With my new project, Doodze, I’m creating the word balloons in Photoshop instead of drawing them by hand. It’s a much better way to guarantee that all dialogue will actually fit when I go to fill it in.

I’ve been slowly re-watching the Lord of the Rings movies recently. This week I’ve been watching the second one, the Two Towers. The talking trees here kind of remind me of the Ents from LOTR. I love the Ents; some great comic relief in there.

Commentary: This comic was posted in early 2005. Around that time, I started writing some of the strips on my own, without Geoff’s help. The problem is that at this point I wasn’t adding the title/credit line at the top, and now I’m not 100% sure who wrote which. But I’m fairly certain this particular one was one of my gags; mostly because it lacks some of the wordy-yet-somehow-elegant-hilariousness of Geoff’s captions. I guess it’s not bad for one of my first solo runs, though.

I have a question, though: can you really attract bees with honey? I mean, bees make honey, don’t they? So why would they be attracted to it? Shouldn’t they be attracted to, you know, whatever they actually eat? Or flowers, maybe, since they use them to make honey? Wouldn’t you be more likely to attract bears with honey?

Wow, now I wish I’d asked those questions when I was writing this thing in the first place. There are so many different directions this gag could have went. People often wonder where artists and writers get their ideas. Well, sometimes it’s as simple as asking questions… no matter how stupid they may seem.

It’s been a crazy week, and it’s not quite over yet. Way too much studying to do, too much on my mind, and I’m not sleeping well. So I haven’t been blogging. So to make up for the lack of content, here are THREE SkitZo MaN strips from the archive for your enjoyment. I’ll hold off on the commentary, except to say 3 things: (1) These were originally posted to SkitZo’s site in early 2005. (2) The first one is kind-of-sort-of relevant now, since this is a Japan-related blog and Japan just had a fairly historical election. And (3) why did I use an Arial/Helvetica font for SkitZo’s dialogue in the second one, anyway? I don’t know what I was thinking… (4) OH — Also, you can barely see them, but Spitball & Straw, a recurring pair of characters, are part of the mob in the second toon, too. I’d forgotten that. OK, that was four things. I’m done now.

PS — This brings us to the end of the content that was included in SkitZo MaN Book One : Idioms for the Insane. If you’ve been enjoying the archives, and would like to be able to read these toons in print form (for easily carrying around and/or reading in the john), please considering supporting your favorite missionary-starving-artist-geek by buying a copy of the book from Indy Planet.

OK… I’m done for real now.

Commentary: And… the SkitZo MaN Archives are back after a short summer break. This one was first posted to SkitZo MaN dot CoM in early 2005. It was another re-make of an old strip from my high school or community college days. The drawing is pretty simple; much less messy when compared to the ’90s version, I’m sure. Nothing too special about it, but I do like the colors. I think I did I pretty good job of giving an otherwise bland picture some depth and sense of perspective.

On another note, sometimes publishing a webcomic can feel like the proverbial “tree falling in the forest with no one to hear”. If you publish a webcomic and no one’s there to read it, is it really a webcomic? I never felt like SkitZo MaN reached as wide of an audience as it could have. Maybe it was just too niche. Maybe it wasn’t as funny as Geoff and I thought. Maybe I didn’t publish as frequently as I should have. I don’t know. But it was fun, anyway.

Commentary: It seems to me, as I recall, this gag was an idea I was sitting on for a long time before using. I seem to remember it being one of the captions Geoff sent me really early on, and I put off using it, thinking that since it was based on the idiom “You can’t judge a book by its cover”, it would be a good piece of cover art for an eventual book. Well, after sitting on it like a year or whatever, I finally did it up and posted it in early 2005. I’m not sure which came first — “rare bird poaching” or naming the book “To Kill a Mockingbird” but for some reason it seemed hilarious at the time. I think Geoff had another crime in mind, but I don’t remember what it was.

A note on the art: One thing I started to do somewhere along the way was use the same colours from SkitZo’s eyes in other parts of the drawing in order to give it a sort of colour pallet and some consistency. In this one it’s obvious. Maybe too obvious, since that orange is so butt-ugly. I’m pretty sure the background was based on the same ugly orange, too, only faded out so it’s hardly recognizable, but still coordinates well.

All that to say, if you’re going to colour your webcomic or toon, there is a lot of thought that goes into that part of the process as well, as it can affect mood/tone, and it can either aid in the story telling or take away from it. The main effect it had in SkitZo MaN was to make what could be visually boring or confusing and make it easier on the eyes, and hopefully more interesting than your average stick man shtick.

Commentary: This brings us up to the beginning of 2005 in our re-runs, and also the first strip I remember putting the copyright info on — a big “duh” that I should have been doing all along in the original run. What I still wasn’t yet doing was putting the name and credits right in the artwork itself, so there is still some light editing to do as I upload these.

By this time I definitely had gotten into a good groove with the colors. The art/design was getting pretty clean and crisp, too. Looking back at my stuff, I can see what other webcomics creators mean when they talk about it taking 20-30 strips at least to find your style, all the stuff leading up to it being a “warm up” or whatever. The way I drew SkitZo changed a lot over the first 20-30 strips, into a cleaner, clearer, easier-to-color style.

I like this one. I mean, I’m not saying I’m awesome or anything (though I might be) but I think it turned out well. Sometimes you look back and think “ugh” and wish you could change it; this one came out OK. I like SkitZo’s facial expression and the fact that we only get a hint of what’s coming out of that mountain.

And let that be a lesson to you: whether it’s webcomics creation and the mistakes we make along the way, or a literal mountain like SkitZo’s, don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.

Or else.

Commentary: This toon brings us to the end of the 2004 SkitZo strips in our re-runs with commentary. And it seems like an appropriate one to end on, too, whether or not it was actually the last one of 2004 originally (of which, as I mentioned before, I can’t be certain because of poor file-naming), though I do think it was.

Why is it appropriate? Because it’s also (I believe) the last time I re-did an old strip from high school. The original had SkitZo parachuting down rather than rocketing up, and was much messier. I like this one, even though SkiZo’s face looks a little “off” and I’m not sure why he’s trying to mine for silver in the clouds with a golden pot. I do enjoy the rocket boots, though.

By the way, if you’re new here, and if you like this toon, you can find more by following the SkitZo MaN category here on the blog, or you can buy the book HERE.

Thanks for reading.