Hi. This is my first comic. This, however, wasn't the original concept for the comic. In fact, this is nothing like the concept for the comic. The original concept for the comic involved me learning how to draw adequately (which I assure you never happened), and the style wasn't going to be Far Side-esque so much as a graphic-novel style story, with a paranormal plot. I later found my idea to be almost entirely embedded in the Constantine comics and movie, so it works out better this way.

The purpose of this comic became for me to jot down whatever I think is funny, and hopefully it'll actually be funny. At the time, I had yet to come across any comics, web or otherwise, that I felt represented my sense of humor, and I'm pleased to say that "Balancing the Budget" succeeded in exactly the way I'd hoped it would: when all was said and done, I read it and laughed. However, since then, I've stumbled across Toothpaste for Dinner, a wonderfully minimalist comic which may be the single funniest comic I read.

Now, as you've noticed, this is a template comic: only one comic (so far) differs from the template, and the advantage is that I can focus on the joke without having to spend time on the drawing. Consequently, this makes things a lot harder: when there are no visual gags, you lose half the medium of a comic. Also, the style I chose makes continuity almost impossible, which is another strain on consistently churning out comics: when you have characters and a fundamental storyline or background, you can make a filler comic about a minor character without having to give it much thought. Since the only character here is fundamentally me (although the name I refer to him as is Seamus McStabby), this kind of filler comic has been virtually impossible. That might sound like a minor thing, but as my loyal readers will notice, I have long periods of writer's block when nothing I come up with is amusing, and I try to avoid putting up any comics that aren't funny.

Sales tax has long been a pet peeve of mine, and Pennsylvania's approach to it is even more annoying. I strongly suspect that there is a long list of which items are taxed (like Coke) and which aren't (like Krispy Kreme Donuts), and all of the profits from the state sales tax goes toward paying the salary of whoever it is that maintains the list. This comic let me combine this annoyance with another hobby of mine, arson. I just find something to be wonderfully funny about unnecessary violence and destruction (crime in general, really), and many of my comics are based on that preoccupation.

Finally, looking back on my earlier comics, I see what I would consider now to be a terrible use of space: the dialogue's focused in the top half of the right side, which would be expectable if I were drawing backgrounds in, but since I've decided to use the entire right side as a large dialogue panel, my later comics try to center it up and fill out the space as best I can. Since it wouldn't take much effort, I have given serious thought to going back and editing all of my old comics to make them look nicer, but I've decided against it. This way I get to look back and see how my humor or writing style have changed, and what mistakes I've fixed along the way.