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About The Strip Dan's World began as crude (Or should I say "cruder"?) sketches in a notebook in High School. Back in Fall of 1992, bored out of my skull in English class, I stick-figurized (Is that a word? It is now.) my friends and my teachers. The original Dan's World was full-page and laden with in-jokes, pointless violence and sexual innuendo. Wait a minute... that means it hasn't changed at all. Nevermind. Start over. Anyway... I did about thirty of those increasingly nonsensical strips. All of which have since been lost to the demons that lived under my bed in those days. Each strip was scrawled, panelless and self-contained, across the page. My friends were highly amused. (Except Jeremy.) The teachers, characters and all the cast introduced in the first two storylines were there. Not much else. At the advice of Jeremy, I reformatted the strip and started over. I cut a lot of useless characters. (Some of whom may eventually find their ways back here.) I made them into the traditional four-panel punchline strips that you might find in your daily newspaper (if you search around). Before two pages of these, I realized that I couldn't keep up the punchline formula, so I ended each strip when I ran out of space. (Causing a lot of readers to say "Hey? Where's the joke?".) I recycled as much of the original thirty as I could, then went on from there... adding more classmates, more teachers, and creating most of the characters you'll meet within the first two years. I did somewhere around 1,250 of these strips. After graduation, (mine, not the characters... they were indefinately in Highschool in those days) I tapered off on it, moving on to comic books. I had maybe four different ongoing comic books, some of which I may end up posting someday. (If you want to see them, and I want to show them.) Dan's World had slipped into oblivion. But it still nagged at me. Especially Jeremy's haunting complaints. "Where's the punchline?" "Why the hell are they stick figures?" "Why did you make me so fat?" It felt like the strip was fatally flawed for all these reasons and more. Besides that, they were all done on cheap, lined paper that would quickly degrade and turn to dust. And they became increasingly lame over the years. And I was growing to hate the look of those notebooks sitting in the corner, all forgotten and dejected. And I had over fifty pages of notes and sketches that I hadn't gotten around to doing. And I felt bad for making Jeremy fat. (I still don't know why I did that... probably just so I could have a fat character.) Sometime in 1996, in the stifling depths of a horrendous marraige, I fled back to my little paper world. I decided no format would work, so I made strips that lasted anywhere from three panels to eight pages. It had become a storyline work. I reintroduced everybody, worked out a storyline where Jeremy wouldn't be fat anymore, and decided to one day let the kids grow up. Looking down at five hours of consecutive work, I was happy with what I saw. (Even though my carpal tunnel was killing me.) I continued that evolution of the comic sporatically for a couple of years, going back to my refuge whenever I needed it. My first son was born, the marraige collapsed, I found love with my best friend, and life moved on. Dan's World didn't. It found itself packed away in a box. Winter of 2002, I found a link in a Livejournal that led me to my first webcomic. I was blown away. Here was something new. Here was something I could fit my little doodles into. Over the course of a few months I found more webcomics and the drive to return to my world became unbearable. Finally I sat down, looked at my old notebooks, got an excruciating migrane, and through the haze of that migrane, I began work on Dan's World Version 4.0. And that's where you are now. Thanks for reading... I'll stop rambling now. |