Ah, the very first Loserz comic(published online). This brings back memories. Whenever I need to reassure myself that yes I am learning and my artwork is improving I go back and look at these old things. Though these original comics are very sloppily done, there is a cartoony charm to them and somewhere along the line I lost the ability to convey expressiveness that my characters portray in these early strips and didn't start to gain it back until was into the hundreds. Originally I meant to start Loserz off with an "introductory" comic where the characters essentially present themselves to the audience and describe who they are. I luckily realized this was very unnecessary and it is almost always better to just throw the viewers into the characters' lives and let their actions describe who they are. This joke is still a pretty weak opening to the comic though... Oh well, I thought it was very cute at the time, and since about three people read the comic at first, it didn't matter too much. I didn't realize until later on that the lawyers mentioned in this comic are obviously local to where I live and only people from my part of Michigan would recognize those names. The fact that I grew up seeing their commercials means nothing to the viewer.
Okay, that thing I said about not literally introducing my characters to the viewer and letting them discover the characters for themselves, I fucked it up with this one. Looking back I wish I hadn't done this, because it's better for the audience see Jodie's slutty ways from her attitude and actions rather than have Ben spell it out for them right then and there. Though the "See my finger, it says fuck you!" line is still rather popular.
Though the anatomy and facial structure in this comic is absolutely atrocious, there is a nice slick quality to some of the linework that makes me appreciate it to this day. This is also the first truly funny comic in my opinion, as the previous two are rather weak. If I had any common sense early on I would have done this one first, not only because it's a better joke to hook the reader's interest, but it also features all three characters. Two more points of note: I love those evil grins on their faces in panel three, and goddamn Eric's eyes are huge!
One of the few anime jokes I'd ever made. I was a bigger fan of anime back in the older days. There's not too much to say about this one except Jodie looks pretty cute in that second panel. At this point I think I've gotten a bit lazy with backgrounds. This is one of the few times I've made it clear that they're sitting in a basement in these "sitting on a couch" comics. Specifically it's Ben's basement, as he's the only one who has one. Though it should be a Gamecube I drew next to the TV rather than a PS2, but I suppose Jodie could have brought it over for them to play on as well. Well, aren't I rambling about the most inane things in these commentaries?
"Sweat and blood was poured into this frightful venture"... ME AM GOOD GRAMMER WRITING!! Ben totally has a Jill Valentine poster on his wall. I would have a Jill Valentine poster on my wall too if I knew where to find a Jill Valentine poster. I'm so jealous of Ben, the bastard. Most fuckable zombie-killing babe, ever. Oh, I was supposed to talk about the comic wasn't I? Originally it was meant to be Ben's little brother Mikey who walked into the room and screamed, but I think I changed it to Jodie because she was taller and would be easier to fit in the panel. I'm a lazy fuck.
If somebody dropped a nuke on the building they film Jerry Springer in killing everyone inside it would be no great loss to humanity. In fact, the human gene pool would probably be improved significantly. I'm of course making fun of how the men on those shows get so jealous whenever they find out their lover all about the pussy, whereas Ben has a more naturally hormonal response. Man, once again I'm noting that despite the fact that the art is sloppier, there is a much more dynamic way I did the poses in these old ones, when was the last time you saw Jodie sitting in that position from that angle? Looks like I'm learning more new things already. *Note to self: Draw her in that outfit again sometime.
The first Loserz comic in color! As I look back at this now I am just starting my insane venture to do every comic in color. It's nice to see how I've improved on that aspect as well. You will note with most of the color comics pre-170 or so I had an intense fear of adding any sort of shading for depth, so many of the comics look very flat or have very little shading added in. My plan was to do every seventh comic in color, and I kept it up for a while there, but I got tired of stopping whatever storyline I was doing to interject with a one-shot joke because I felt like the colored comics should be "special". I also had the intention of having Jodie's hair and shirt color change with every colored comic. That idea died pretty fast. I do think the purple bangs are a good look for her.
Oftentimes when Ben waxes philosophical Eric gives simple responses in a "Hobbes-ish" manner. That chick's boobs (something just doesn't seem write in the grammatical nature of that phrase) should really be bigger and stand out more to emphasise focus on them. This also begins the "wacky signs in the background" trend. I still think "Buy our fucking stuff!!" is one of the funniest things I've ever put in the comic when looked at in context. Just imagine going to a store and there's a sign just screaming and cursing at you to buy things. I find it amusing. Real stores should do that.
I love these comics where Ben takes something simple and blows it out of proportion. It's where the weirder elements of his personality really shine. Though there are times where I do believe it's rather justified to compare high school to an evil fascist regime. Though the cast page pegs Tim Warren's first appearance as further ahead in the archives that's actually him standing there in the "Joint" shirt in front of Jodie. I love this comic because I can break all the dresscode rules that my high school had. Fun!
This is a true story! One more than one occasion my school district conspired to coerce my money from me through sloppy bookkeeping methods. The science-fiction title in question was returned heartily on time when I borrowed it and the next year when I went to registration day to get my parking pass they told me I never brought it back and wanted to make me pay for the whole thing! I told them they'd damn well better go check their library again and make sure it was there. They found it with a, "Sorry, we were wrong," but I was naturually suspicious. There had been a previous occasion where they told me I never returned a book, and I told them they were full of shit, and they assured me I was in fact the one who was full of shit, so I went right up to the bookcase and pulled out the very book in question and showed it to them. From that point on every time a librarian walked by, I would narrow my eyes.
My school was always pretty adamant in their policies on scheduling. They made it pretty clear that under no circumstances would they so much as entertain the idea of letting someone alter their schedule at the beginning of the year. I never had any real problems with my schedule, but I often wondered if anyone was ever caught in this sort of predicament in the event of a grievous computer error. I always find it amusing when adult authority figures act in an immature way.
This is the definative Loserz comic. This comic in my opinion sums up the sarcasm and feel of the entirety of Loserz in one fell swoop. Not only that but it is one of those comics that totally hit me with a spontaneous burst of genius. And I think it's fucking hilarious. Why yes I do own that horn that I am tooting. But seriously, I really really like this joke and still think it's one of the best Loserz comics ever done. There was an "original" version of this comic I did in physics class, where the expression on Ben's face as he held up the fork was much more ludicrious and in my opinion, entertaining, but at that time I didn't understand facial expressions as well as I do now and couldn't duplicate it quite as successfully.
This is also a good comic. This is the comic that most people tell me "made them a fan". I've seen girls almost literally do this. There's not much else to say about it other than this is the only time Tim has actually appeared in this comic as of this writing. It inadvertantly makes a continuity clash with Ben's "tourettes syndrome" method of talking to girls he develops later on. Granted the idea had not crossed my mind at the time. Oh well. It's worth the crack at fickle women.
The last "full page" color comic to appear for a very long time. After making Jodie's hair blue I had pretty much already gotten sick of changing her hair color and decided I would rather keep it a consistent green. I like Jodie's immaturity gag in this comic, and those cow-poop keychains were rather popular at the time, but the Eric one is rather weak. Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything better. Sheesh, I'm just ruining all these comics for you aren't I?
I really like this comic too. It just reminds me of how in middle school kids would use that masturbation trick on you and you would be utterly utterly humiliated but by high school you and your friends would loudly joke about spanking the proverbial Monkey without the slightest hint of shame. I also like it because it insinuates that Jodie pleasures herself as well. It's rare that you meet women who will admit to masturbation in this world, which is very unusual to me. It indicates that there is either a gross hormonal imbalance between the genders, or that the women of the world are fucking liars. Except the cool ones like Jodie. And no I'm not saying that girls who masturbate are sluts. Get over yourselves. Don't make me hit you again.
The only time I've ever actually used Jockstrap and Jacket in the comic. And it will probably never happen again. Originally when I created these characters Ben was much more the central character and I created Jockstrap to be an antagonistic villainous bully role. But around the time the comic became Loserz, the plot and ideas had changed somewhat and as it turns out the bullies became rather unnecessary. I originally drew this as a four page comic in one of my sketchbooks and it was pretty funny at the time, but when I started doing it here the datedness of it suddenly screamed out at me and I stopped halfway through. Oh well.
This is page two of the storyline that got cut off by my first drop off the face of the earth. Luckily the two comics work okay on their own, in a weak sort of way. Moving on...
If Loserz had an awkward puberty phase, this would be it. I had failed to update Loserz for several months because of laziness and my efforts on The Adventures Of Max And Cecil. When I decided I would start doing Loserz again, I was encumbered with the delusion that I needed to totally revamp it to revitalize my interest in it. As such I butchered many elements of the characters(Jodie in particular) and switched over to an different art style that I use when drawing certain other comic ideas of mine. I actually wrote this comic as a "new beginning" for Loserz thus writing the previous seventeen out of existence. Luckily my senses came back to me before I went too far with any of these ideas and caused permanent damage and I was able to re-integrate the previous comics back into the continuity without any problems and pretend I had performed no rape upon my creation. As for this comic in particular, I have nothing against it, though Jesse is unfortunate to have to look very very odd in her first appearance.
Like I said, I had written this comic with the intention of making a new beginning to Loserz and this continuity was meant to be Ben's new "introduction". Thus the name "Ben" appearing Clerks-style at the bottom of the last panel. It was intended to be a long-running continuity based on a Loserz "comic book" I drew in one of my sketchbooks, with the characters re-written in their new butchered roles (especially Jodie. I dare not tell you how I destroyed the integrity of her character for the shame I still feel). I wound up re-using all the good jokes from that comic book in future comics and no true harm was done. Luckily I even cut this storyline off at a good choke-point because already common sense was creeping its way back up my brainstem and showing me the error of my ways.
There's something, unholy, about drawing Jodie in a super-skinny style so that her figure cannot be properly portrayed in all its shapely glory. Thank God I went back on my decision eh? I do like this comic anyway though. I fear to think what would happen if all my religious relatives on my mom's side of the family stumbled across it. And at the same time I am intrigued by that possibility. I derive a certain lustful satisfaction from pointing out the hypocrisies of the religious and the homophobic. I should put Homophobe Jones in the comic more often. There's nothing to break writer's block quite like a close-minded twit.
It's amusing to notice that Mrs. Snockenflaubin isn't really all that different when drawn in this style. Though I don't use her often she's probably one of the most fun characters to draw in the entire strip. And I get a real kick out of making a mockery of shitty art-classes. I had a ceramics class in high school which was pretty close to this representation during the first few weeks. I've only had one teacher that was as flamboyant as Mrs. Snockenflaubin, and he was one of the good ones. In terms of values she's based on all the bad art teachers I've had and their ridiculous notions. She would be really cool if she weren't so pretentious. I also think this comic still has some of the nicest backgrounds and layouts I've ever done. I've also noticed that one can also make a totally unintentional marijuana sub-text out of the dialouge in the last panel. If one were so inclined.
As you can see the art is finally returning to something closer to it's former state. There were some changes I liked and decided to keep, such as drawing the girls with lips and using blackfill to represent all dark-colored things, but I realized that the "super skinny" style made it feel like I wasn't really drawing Loserz anymore. This is the point where everything pretty much reverted back to normal. This comic is still one of my personal favorite jokes. It's also one of the earliest ideas I ever came up with when I made these characters. I never took my SAT's. I wonder when that slow horrible death will be coming for me...
Here's another comic that's considered a "classic". About 90% of my female readers consider this their favorite comic. I'm rather fond of it myself. One of the reasons I made Jodie the way she is isn't just to have a hot fantasy girl who does naughty things I can draw a lot, but also to point out how unfair the world is to someone like her. The art style finally settled down into something that managed to capture the spirit of Loserz but still have a few improvements. There are several recurring characters in this comic as well. I drew Carrie way too tall though. But this was before I settled down and made myself start deciding on specific heights for each character. Unfair Double Standards became a running joke there for a while, and I'm sure if I get another good idea for it I'll revive it once more. I'll make the text for its logo hella bigger though.
At the time I did this short series of comics I was working at a restaurant as a busboy, pretty much identical to how I portray Eric's workplace. It's one of those not-quite-fancy but definitely-more-expensive-than-all-the-other-restaurants type places. The job was rough and tiring and messy, but it had decent pay and happened to be heavily populated with a veritable army of hot sexy waitresses most of whom I wanted very badly to do naughty naughty things with. It's one of the few things I really miss about that job. Anyhoo, all the waitresses portrayed in that last panel are actual depictions of the ladies I worked with: The cute asian one, the one with the great ass, and the one with the nice rack(who also happened to be the daughter of one of my art teachers. Go figure.)
That skinny guy is my friend Mike. The scary thing is he actually is that twiglike. I feel that's a pretty accurate representation of the owner of the resaurant I worked at too. Though once he discovered fire he would also threaten us with burning brands.
Feh, this is one of the few times I've used the ol' copy-and-paste method of cartooning that's so prevalent in webcomics. And it didn't really work too well either. The idea itself is a little weak and my poor renditions of the tables didn't help. The joke was basically about how when you're working at a restaurant as a busboy you tend to stand around for a long time waiting for some sort of work to come along and then of course everyone in the restaurant leaves at once and leaves you with more work than you can handle. It's annoying. The fact that the background is just repeated over and over again doesn't help either. I rarely copy and paste because I like to make expressions and poses unique from panel to panel. It was all in all a big ugly rush job and turned out a rather unsucessful comic in my opinion.
Trying to figure out the panel layout for this comic was quite a hair-pulling adventure. In the end it turned out rather nice though and I like the timing on this comic. It's kind of a cliche joke but it's still one I'm fond of. It's one of the few times you see Jodie's more "girly" side (in addition to her ass).
I did this comic for one reason and one reason only really. To have Max hitting on Jodie with the "knees" line. But there are other benefits to it. I had already long ago planned in the Max and Cecil crossover for the waterfight storyline and this was a good enough way to introduce the readers to the fact that I'll put the odd little animals readily into the Loserz universe. Oftentimes I get caught up in very "realistic" storylines where nothing particularly out of the ordinary happens, but there are some very ludicrious things that happen to our Loserz from time to time. Of course, this also made for an easy "singel panel color comic" idea back then as well. See, at this point I had decided that every color comic I did would be a single panel (or a single row of panels) because I had decided it would "take too long" to do a full sized colored comic. God I was a pussy. Oh yeah, and that is quite possibly the worst Eric I have ever drawn.
I really like how the green speech bubble in that last panel turned out. Ben is skilled at torturing his little brother in one way or another. The art style is dated at this point but I do like how that computer table looks. Not really too much else to say about this, except maybe to say that the joke is one of sarcasm and anyone who thinks videogames actually make people violent needs to fuck themself with a spiked pole.
This comic has the best title ever. The timing on this comic is nice, though Eric looks very funny. A this point I wasn't drawing the back of my character's skulls properly and in the case of Eric it makes his head look kind of like a pill. I've noticed that in this particular stretch of the archives I have a tendency to put thumbs at very awkward angles.
I do believe this comic may be up there with some of the worst Erics I've ever drawn.
This is one of those rare instances in the older comics where I would draw Jodie wearing a different shirt. Nowadays I make my characters change their outfits all the freakin' time, but back then I would just get sick of drawing Jodie wearing that same green shirt and would change her up a bit. The only problem with it is it throws off the flow since none of the other characters would tend to wear anything different unless it was a very special occasion. I'm noticing as time goes on I'm doing more and more things that make the comic more difficult for me, but they also seem to improve it. When pulled off successfully of course. I'll let you all in on a little secret. While I do do Loserz to tell the story in my head and hope to make something more professional out of it, its primary purpose is to force me to experiment and learn new things. Loserz is me practicing my art more than anything else. Sometimes I forget that and let the drawings get stale, but you can really see progress when flipping through these.
Ok, first off, I think this comic is funny. Secondly it's a good example of how not only does my art style evolve, but my opinion of it as well. Back when I first drew this comic I thougt to myself "Damn, this looks perfect! This is it! I've finally perfected Loserz's art!" Now looking back on it this comic looks very odd too me. The characters have freakishly long monkey arms, the poses are awkwardly angular (as opposed to the good kind of angular special kinds of artists are able to pull off), and the construction of the characters' heads is terrible. Ben and Jodie's expressions in that third panel look particularly bizarre and alien to me now and their ears are insanely tiny to boot. Do yourselves a favor folks and learn proper skull construction. It'll frustrate you at first but once you get used to it you'll be amazed at how much more 3-d your characters will feel. It's funny how people's interperetation of their own art will change over the years. I'm pretty fond of how my art looks now, but likely when I get into the 300's (God-willing) I'll be thinking "Damn, what was I thinking when I shaded this panel?"
You could almost say that this comic has the opposite quality of the previous one. Jodie's body, while not perfect, looks pretty damn good even by my improved standards in this comic. Every now and then I will accidentally do something just right ahead of its time, and this is one of those occasions. Of course her head and the art of Ben are still kinda funny looking. But it's not half bad for only #35 out of 185 comics so far.
Arlighty, where to begin with this one... it's one of those little slice-of-life dealies that isn't particularly funny but it's something we're familiar with (I think many of us know what it's like to have crammed 3 cubic miles of paper into a binder until it borders on bursting), but I got very lazy with it. Had I made the drawing a little more lively, made the binder appear more like it's about to explode, the comic would have been a bit funnier, but I had a bad habit of rushing through these colored comics. As you can see I had become SO afraid of shading at this point that I abandoned it altogether. You will be glad to know that I do eventually improve.
This one makes me laugh in a grossed out kind of way. I like it because it merges a good "Ben moment" with a good "Jodie moment". Ben obviously takes things way too literally at times. Though I don't look at Jodie's sluttiness as a horrible thing I don't try to glorify it either. Like a realistic slut, she sometimes does very dirty things, sometimes for personal gain. Who doesn't sometimes do very dirty things though? Boring people, that's who!
Please try your hardest to tear your eyes away from the sight of Ben's freakishly long monkey arms. I don't know what possessed me to draw my characters so... lengthy at this stage in the comic but I'm glad I moved past it. He looks like he could tickle a midget in a tree. Anyway, enough complaining about my old artwork, this officializes the eyefork as a running gag. Booya! It also makes a running gag out of Ben taking his employers' orders too seriously. Two running gags for the price of one! Look at them run! WHOOO!!! ... it's late.
Okay, so it's like this, I wanted to have all three of my characters work at jobs I'd worked at. But I'd only had two jobs at the time of writing this storyline, so I decided to have Ben and Jodie get jobs at places where my friends worked. The fellow in this comic is my friend Jason, who worked at Kinkos at the time before their corporate whores fucked him. In the bad way. I should make a comic about that actually. Oh yeah, and that's me in the third panel. I came upon a dilemma when trying to figure out how to insert myself in this comic. I had to make it myself to actually portray the most hideously inept person at using copy machines ever. I could win an award for Excellence In Xerox Bafflement. But I digress, it didn't seem quite right to put myself in in my chibi form unless I was blatantly breaking the forth wall. So I opted to draw myself with realistic proportions just this once. It will NEVER happen again. I vastly prefer my tiny, big-headed avatar for all self-insertions.
I'm sure I've commented on this earlier but damn I still have to mention how wierd Eric's head looks in these comics. I can't wait until I reach the part of the archives where I know proper skull construction and that stops bothering me. I love the name "Cock-In-The-Box". Too bad I can't take credit for creating it. That goes out to my friend Tom who works at a chicken joint on which Cock In The Box is based. Problem is I never worked there so I was never really able to come up with any good jokes about conditions there, just occasionally through out some cheap dick jokes. I like the first panel in this comic. It has a relatively dynamic pose and there's something hot about drawing a cute girl with an intense gaming face.
That bottom panel is the best panel I've ever drawn. It's so great I used it twice. Women, you should be getting on your knees and giving me blowjobs by the dozens for the amazingness of that panel. LOOK AT IT!
I live in Michigan, where the weather does in fact prove that Mother Nature gets PMS. And is bi-polar. Obviously it makes sense for me to set Loserz in Michigan because jokes about the weather like this are just too scrumptious to pass up. I can tell that I rushed on the drawings of this comic. Eric's coat and Jodie's pose have a very half-assed quality about them. But rushing comics is unfortunately an inevitability to the artist who juggles both school and a job at the same time.
This one was easy, it's pretty much word for word something I said in a conversation on the subject one day in school. The background colors on this one are absolutely hideous. Not one of my best works artistically, but it gets the job done. It still bothers me how wierd Eric's head looks in these particular comics, but I've mentioned that about a million times now haven't I?
Another comic where I had a pretty decent idea but backed it up with some seriously shitty art. Those two hypocritical fellows in this comic I have lovingly named Scumball and Jerkass respectively and used surprisingly often for a couple of shmucks I just made up out of nowhere. Looking back on this one I wonder why I considered it so incredibly necessary to make the male homosexual so incredibly flaming-looking. It appears that his confession shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone.
I worked at the restaurant Eric works at at the time I made this comic. What better source of inspiration is there than the desire to make fun of your superiors at work? Some people mistook Eric in this comic for me because he's not wearing his hat. But I had at this point decided never to put myself in the comic again with realistic proportions, so it couldn't possibly be me.
I try not to do gaming jokes often. 1. Because there are already so many comics that rely heavily on gaming jokes. 2. I could never be as good at it as Penny Arcade. And 3. That's just not the kind of comic I want to make. However, when you have a comic about three outcasts in high-school society videogames simply must come into play sometime or another. I think this one is pretty cute. Though another downside to these kinds of jokes is that they require to be read by people with knowledge of the material (Final Fantasy games) and the legacy of said material (the fact that this was the first final fantasy game with voice-acting). I like to aim for comics that tend to be more approachable by the masses, something everybody knows a little about and can think "Yeah, I've been there." However, when I get a really good idea like this I'd never forgive myself for passing it up.
Mmm, can you smell the bitterness in the air? I do not watch TV often. It is a cesspool of tripe shit most of the time. But every now and then a golden jewel of writing comes along and entices me with it's cleverness and I dare say I sit down regularly and enjoy that show. And inevitably within a few weeks, ESPECIALLY if it's on FOX or MTV, the show gets fucking cancelled. Titus, Family Guy, Clone High, these are some of the finest and funniest shows ever crafted by human hands and they've all been completely fucked over by their networks. It pisses me off so bad. I believe it was the great Josh Lesnick of Girly fame who stated that if they made a channel entirely out of shows that were aired and then quickly cancelled by FOX or MTV it would be the best channel ever. I'd have to say I may agree.
More fun with Mrs. Snockenflaubin. God that woman is fun to draw! And her dialogue so wonderfully satirical. If she were animated she would totally move like William Shatner in that one episode of Family Guy. Jodie's artistic taste is obviously a reflection of my own. Pierced tits and giant robots are my bread and fucking butter.
Jodie's line in that first panel is one of my personal favorites. I can never take seriously a teacher who will show me pictures of fucking squares and tell me it's art then try to convince me that comics are a waste of time. If drawing giant robots and monsters and boob after wonderful, glorious boob is not art then fuck art. You can take your art and shove it. Why don't you marry your art and run away to artville where you can draw all the fucking bowls of fruit you want if you love it so much? I on the other hand will be enjoying the time I spend with my pencil thank-you-very-much.
Light dildo! Episode 2, which I admit I found guilty pleasure in watching in spite of the writing being the equivalent of tripe donkey shit(but it was donkey shit that looked good), was coming out in just a month or so around this time and I, despite never being a really big fan of Star Wars other than enjoying the occasional viewing of the movies, felt it necessary to make two weeks worth of jokes in celebration. What can I say? Star Wars is a wellspring of amusing material to tease. This idea in particular was quite old. I had sketched out the precurser to this "light dildo" comic long before I ever even considered doing Loserz online. Now with my little celebration of Episode 2's imminent arrival, I saw fit to implement it. I like the coloring in this comic too. Of all the old colored comics, I think this is the best-looking one.
Though the Leia one was originally my favorite of this two week stint, I think this one is actually the most amusing of them all. I had to look up reference pics for just about every character I wanted to include in my Star Wars "snacks" series. Yoda looks pretty good, but Eric has a freaky box-like face. Looks like he got smashed against plexiglass in panel 3.
Man, Vader is such a bitch. You should see it when you burn his bagels. The fellow in panel one is actually my friend Scott, who I decided will be my obligatory "kill" character in case I need some random extra character to murder.
I like this one. Nothing particularly special to comment on about it. Luke is a whiny bitch, everyone knows that regular frozen coke is eighty jabillion times better than any other flavor anyway.
This comic may be one of the cleverest things I've ever come up with. I win! Seriously, when I first wrote it it was all I could do to keep from bending over and giving myself a blowjob, because I fucking deserved it.
It kinds of looks like Eric and Ben are holding hands in that first panel. We're reaching the point where my comics tend to waste a lot of space in the panels due to me drawing the characters much smaller than is necessary. I mean, look at how tiny Ben's head is in panel two. He takes up less than a fifth of it. My friends and I had the same discussion on Episode 2. We went and saw it opening day anyway. Funny how hypocritical we all are at times. I recieved an e-mail(or maybe a forum post, I can't remember) from some guy who suggested that I change the punchline of the comic to something less violent. He was afraid people would go out to theaters and kill eachother to get into episode two just by reading my demonspawn comic. I saw it as completely unneccessary, since for one, it is pretty goddamned obvious that the line is a joke, and that Ben and Eric will not really be going down to the theater for a slaughter this friday. And besides that, anybody crazy enough to go kill people over Episode 2 because they read a comic about it is probably gonna go around killing people anyway. Plus the alternate punchline the guy gave me was complete shit.
Nice and simple and to the point this one was. Obviously I loved the Spider-Man movie. This is possibly because it's the best superhero movie ever made? I think so. Fuck Batman, I don't care if its got Jack Nicholson in it, as it turns out Willem Dafoe is even more of a badass. Wish there were something that could be said about the comic itself? Well, that makes two of us.
We've all got those friends don't we? You don't get laid for long months at a time, or god forbid, are still a virgin, and they will get uppity after a mere week with no play. Drives you up the friggen' wall it does. Now, the art in this comic is very strange. What stands out to me the most is how Jodie in the first panel is a drawing that could have been very very nice but with one fatal flaw. Her body from her legs up to the top of her breasts is just about perfect in shape and form, but then her shoulders in addition to being too far up are also twisted at an odd angle, as if her arms and shoulderblades have become seperate from the rest of her skeleton and now float several inches too high under her skin. Go ahead, put your hand up to the screen and cover her very top portion and you will think, "dayum, that is one fine looking body" then remove your handa and "AAAAAH! CREEPY TWISTED GIRL MADE OF RUBBER!"
Ah, this old joke hearkens back to the not-so-good old days on Keenspace. I didn't have much right to complain about Keenspace's frequent outages since I was hosted for free, but still, I couldn't help but joke about it. The stress of my site being unavailable for viewing several times per week just broke me. Originally the "key element" was some sort of penguin, but for some reason that I can't possibly remember I changed it to the "bear of doom". This was a big mistake since it's kind of making a bear theme with the last panel, and I wanted the comic to be as ridiculously confusing and random as possible. Sometimes I just don't think clearly. Oh well, it still successfully fails to make sense. I like the way those bear suits turned out.
Not too much I can think to say about this one right now. It's a pretty cute comic in my opinion. Jodie once again is bluntly honest about who she is and doesn't really glorify anything. She watches out for her two boys, she doesn't want them to spend their whole lives holed up in the basement around videogames. While she may not be perfectly socially well-adjusted, she understands the importance of just getting out and doing things. I needed more friends like this back in the day, who would practically drag me out against my will to invoke social experiences in my life. But the older I get the more I am able to join social experiences on my own. Thus begins the party storyline.
I like the timing on this comic. And for it's time the art isn't half bad either. Adam makes a brief cameo in the background. I never had a real friend like Jodie, though I did "date"(read hang out and have random sex with) a girl who was not totally unlike her, but with a lot more self-loathing and depressing apathy. It would have been nice to have a friend who made out with other girls on a somewhat regular basis at that age though. I wonder if Ben and Eric always realize how lucky they are.
I've always wanted to do this.
I don't remember exactly how I got this idea but I thank whatever muse saw fit to give it to me first because this was definitely a classic comic from the first pen stroke and probably one of the main reasons you fuckers keep coming back to read this shit. This is Ben's main problem, he thinks too much. I can't remember how many times I've said incredibly stupid shit to girls because I sat there and thought about it too damn long. I've since learned that lesson though and my luck with the ladies has gone up significantly. Not to say that when you take it easy and just let fly with whatever's on your mind you don't ever say stupid things either. Hell no. But that kind of stupid stuff is usually more likely to come off as endearing or humorous at least. Stupid stuff that is thought about too much usually scares girls.
Alice Baker makes her first appearance, as well as Jesse and Carrie in non-dreamworld or cameo roles. This is yet another example of being fucking LAZY early on and coming up with the cheapest, crappiest looking solution to a problem. Alice Baker is black. I had to have some way to show this without putting a sign floating over screaming "BLACK GIRL" with arrows pointing at her. A more talented artist might be able to make the ethnicity clear without using skintone, I could not at the time, and still am a bit iffy on that subject even today. In any case, I thought to myself, "Erik, how can I make her skin look darker without resorting to the incredibly easy, simple, and barely time-consuming at all method of making the comic into lineart and shading her in with gray on the computer? Oh I know! I'll tone her in with pencils! That way it'll look terrible! Great idea!" It probably took just as much time to color her skin in with pencils as it did when later on I finally wizened up and did it the digital way. Oftentimes during these old comics, I was stupid.
This was a cheap easy comic. At least the coloring isn't terrible and I made a passable attempt at shading. Not really much else to say about it. Except maybe that there is a number of female fans of the comic that want to fuck Jodie that I find rather satisfying. Satisfying indeed...
Aaah, the (in)famous Loserz monologues scenes. This is the first time I intentionally made "serious" Loserz comics. It reeks a little of melodrama, but I just really wanted to use this party as a way to really get inside the character's heads. I look back on these with somewhat mixed feelings, but eh, all in all it's good to have them there. This comic isn't always fun and games. By the way, last panel, worst Alice ever. I didn't even bother to do the shitty pencil-shading on her that time. It's a good thing I stopped sucking at drawing by the time I finally re-introduced her to the story.
The girl Jodie's making out with in those first couple panels is my friend Jana. Gotta give the props. Anyhoo, of these "monologue" comics I'd say Jodie's turned out the best, in both composition and writing quality. I rue the day I made the last panel that way though. Fucking Christ but there were a lot of people confused to high hell about how I arranged that last panel. Basicall, that's Jodie's body with an enlarged picture of her enraptured face superimposed behind. It was supposed to be artsy or some shit. About a zillion people though came to me wondering who that "other girl" in the pic was. If there was some other girl in the pic why would Jodie's head be so fucking huge?? Eh, it's just one of those examples of times where my artwork ideas didn't quite work out as well as I'd hoped. What I should have done was just split the shots of her body and face up into two seperate panels, but eh, you know what they say about the quality of hindsight...
Ben is clearly the hopeless romantic of the trio. I've grown and matured some since I started doing this comic and as such looking back on this one makes me think of it as a little melodramatic, but then again, I certainly wasn't too different from this when I was 16. Nowadays I'm far less Ben and much more Adam on the confidence scale where women are concerned. But this isn't about me. I'd also like to say that even almost 2 years later I really like the way that photograph in the first panel turned out. There's all kinds of jokes about girls being dumb and high school sucking and "hur hur, he made a masturbation funny" but I like to think that the biggest primary theme of Loserz is the friendship between the main characters, and I slip a few touching moments like that in now and then to show it. It's their bond that holds it all together for me.
Nothing special to say about this one. We've got Adam making a cameo in panel one, and other than that this is just a kind of "cute" comic solidifying the friendship element of the comic. Panel 3 is adorable. And something about the way Jodie's tits look in panel two is particularly satisfying.
This comic came out pretty nice for its time. This one actually surprised me for how well it went over. I heard from my college friends especially that this comic was a big hit on campus and graced many a dorm room door. Sometimes I'll get an idea like this that I think is merely an average joke but turns out to be extremely popular. Panel one is a good example of those rare moments where I actually used some sort of dynamic pose in this stage of the archives. It's got a nice relaxed, casual feel to it.
This is a fairly average comic, it's main purpose to serve as exposition so that the events involving Jimmy during the "school day" storyline can occur later. Jodie is kind of in-between Eric and Ben on the romance scale. Eric is pretty casual and doesn't go looking for relationships, only becoming interested in girls when they fall into his lap, Ben on the other hand pines incessantly with crushes and fantasies. Jodie falls in the middle though, she has lots of casual flings, but is susceptible to the occasional attack of romantic infatuation. The car Eric drives at this stage in the comic is pretty much a replica of the one I was driving at the time. A junky old '91 Ford Probe. Her name was Clunker. R.I.P. The car looks rather odd in that first panel though, the front half is kind of a 3/4 overhead view where as the backside is right the fuck on a side-view. I don't know what on earth made me goof up the perspective back then. It's funny how obvious these things seem these days.
On the sheet of bristol board this was the cheapest looking comic ever. Probably took about ten minutes to draw. But I managed to do a halfway decent job coloring it and manage to fake it looking good. I could have at least drawn a couple classmates sitting in front of and behind him. I don't know why I'm so lazy sometimes, I seriously don't. For the record, finals do suck. Nothing worse than trying to pull four or five essays out of your ass in a miniscule time frame. And I've always hated teachers that require rough drafts. What if we just plain get it right on the first try? I know it's rare, but goddammit, I don't like being forced to edit something just because.
THERE'S THAT FUCKING PANEL AGAIN!! ISN'T IT AWESOME?? DON'T YOU WANT TO FUCK MY BRAINS OUT BECAUSE IT IS SO SPECTACULARLY SPOOGIFEROUS??
Oh-ho! The waterfight storyline. Now here is quite a can of worms for me to commentate upon. Where to begin? Well, I came up with this storyline about a year before I started posting Loserz online, doodling it out in five-inch long sketches every so often. And what you see is virtually unchanged in terms of the plot and dialogue. I have mixed feelings about this particular arc. On the one hand, the story contains some of my favorite writing and jokes. On the other, we have the fact that many comics in this arc contain some of the worst artwork in the whole archive. this first one despite cosmetic improvements I've made since then actually doesn't look too bad. There's lots of ups and downs in the artwork over this plotline. Finally, there's an issue about Jodie's thong, but we'll get to that particular point later on.
Let me get something perfectly clear. All you motherfuckers out there who hate the Max and Cecil story back early on in the archives and haven't even bothered to read it all the way through? You guys are fucking douchebags and I hope somebody rapes and kills your mothers. I love sticking these little guys in the comic. It's always fun to write and draw them, and they really help make this storyline work. Panel 2 in this comic is one of my most favorites ever. If you pay attention to this comic(or if I ever get a cast page up and running again) you will notice that all three of the main characters are named after guns. There have been many inquiries as to what the inspiration or meaning behind this is. To be honest it's pretty simple though. I knew very early on that I wanted Ben's last name to be Winchester. I had a fuck of a difficult time trying to come up with last names for the other two that didn't suck hard, and my friend Jason one day came up with the idea of just naming the other two after brands of firearm as well. And it stuck.
Now that I look back, Jodie's body in that first panel looks pretty good. The proportions are all right the fuck on and everything. The other panels however leave a lot ot be desired. I want to try and not tear up my old artwork on these old comics so much anymore, but I still can't stand the way she looks in those last two panels. Now, in the original tiny doodles for this series in my sketchbook, Jodie had put on a pair of cutoff jeans for the duration of this storyline starting with this comic. Oh how I wish to bloody Jesus I had left it that way. The borderline obscene amounts of thong-shots that crop up are excessive even by my standards. There's fanservice, and then there's just too damn much. Me and my damn hormones sometimes, I swear...
Obviously Calvin and Hobbes was one of my great comic influences. This storyline could almost be considered an homage to Bill Watterson's work. Max and Cecil were some of the earliest original characters I came up with, and I stil love their style. Especially those little floaty eyebrows. Those things make me giggle. Scribblekid seems to be far too attracted to Max in those shorts though.
There's not really much to this one. Mostly another expositional comic. I rarely have a lot to say about those. This one did a good job of firing up interest in the readers though. Lots of "oooh, aaaah, I wonder what he's planning!" Which was pretty cool as I didn't have many readers at all at the time, and any time they perked up and showed some interest in the comic was a special treat.
Okay, this is just bloody gratuitous. Like I've mentioned, I have a severe case of mixed feelings on this comic, and this falls on the extreme end of the bad side of those feelings. It's not that Jodie wouldn't wear a thong bikini, and I have nothing against the occasional sexy butt shot, but this is just impractical fanservice and I should really have treated her better than that for the integrity of this silly ass plotline. Like I said, in the original sketches for this comic, Jodie was wearing a pair of cutoff jean shorts. Why I changed it I cannot say for sure, other than probably trying to milk some more readers in by their hormones. In fact, the original draft didn't even contain this comic. I made it up merely so I could have some one panel "joke" to do for the seventh color comic. It's shameful though, and I am not proud of it today. Still, it shall be left up as a testament. I don't like it when people go back and change old things just because they can. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, I'm looking in your direction.
Now we jump to the positive side of those mixed feelings. I love this one. It seems to me it doesn't get nearly as much recognition as it deserves. Max and Cecil add a nice rich layer of loony to this comic cake that I bake. Oooh, I think I'm a rapper now. I like to be a rapper, like my burgers in a wrapper. Yeah bitch! West siyeed! *white guy dance*
If you're just now starting to read Loserz, you're bloody lucky, because you didn't have to wait a month for this comic to finally come up. You know, you'd think in a month I could manage to bring out something that doesn't completely cop out on the backgrounds. Only the dialogue and Max getting shot in the face saves this one. It's another nice "Calvin and Hobbes" type moment. I love the way Cecil looks in that second panel too. I want a model of that I can stick on my drawing table. Like he's holding me hostage for one million comics. Fun Fact: Only now, after almost two years, and being the narcissistic person I am, I flip through my archive a lot, only now do I notice that I forgot to color in Cecil's shorts in panel three.
There are times, especially in these still somewhat early days, where I would put very little effort into a comic, then follow it up with something with a whole bunch of effort. Look at how closely I matched the size of that bush in the fourth panel. I'm surprised I pulled that off as wello as I did. Comics like this probably make Ben fangirls squeal with joy, because we all know how much they love shirtless skinny boys.
In the old days the best way to cop out of drawing backgrounds in every panel was to try and find a way to do creative blackfill. These days I bust my own chops a lot harder and do my damndest to put actual background in every panel of the comic. It's a lot more work but I think it creates a much more solid feel in the comic. Once again with the gratuitous thong shots too. What was wrong with me? Can someone tell me what the hell was wrong with me?
Once again the Calvin and Hobbes influence shows through with the kind of double-crossing that was always going on in those comics. Not much to say about it beyond that.
I've always loved Max's sense of logic. It's shit like this that makes those two little animals so much fun to write for. It's amusing how a couple of two-foot tall animals can be swayed by a human girl's feminine wiles.
That's probably the only other good thong shot in this comic besides the first one I like the timing on this one. Once again those twisty "Calvin and Hobbes"esque double-crosses come into play.
Now this is one of the best looking comics in this questionably drawn storyline. I particularly like how ludicrous Eric looks in that last panel. The original sketches for his water cannon were not nearly as preposterous to look at. I think the ducky innertube seals the deal really. One problem I had with this comic though was people would read it at the time and go "Oh! Haha! Great Mario Sunshine reference!", which would piss me off because this water cannon Eric comes up with has NOTHING at all do do with that fantastic game. I wrote this entire storyline at least a full year before that game was even being previewed. Nothing worse than a joke synching up with some popular culture icon.
Somehow Eric always manages to look good from a low camera angle. That nuclear water explosion came out nice. I wonder how long this comic took to draw. Probably only a couple of hours. I managed to put some good effort into making the lines and details look good though, unlike certain others. Still, it couldn't have taken long though, being only two panels taking up one row. When I think about how it takes 5-8 hours to get every single comic done these days, I wonder how I could have ever considered these old black and white comics a burden back then. Raise the bar... raise the bar...
Not much to say about this one, except maybe mention that my friend Tom spooged his pants when he saw how cute Max looks soaking wet.
For all the complaining I did about the artwork in this arc, this last comic came out nice. The lines are all nice and clean and nothing looks sloppy or half-assed. And the motion in the fifth panel comes across really well. I have to admit that when I feature these two critters Max tends to take up the spotlight with his enthusiastic cheer, but I really like Cecil too and like giving him a moment to shine like this now and then.
Ha ha ha! How cute. I was making my storylines conform to real-time. This does not happen anymore. As far as I'm concerned from now on time moves at the pace I want it to in Loserz. However, as of the time I write this I've started updating five days a week. That might allow me to make things synch up a little more. We'll see. So yeah. Super Mario Sunshine reference, uh... that game was good. I'm rusty at this commentary thing, it's been a while.
Not much to say about this one. I kind of wish I had put a little more effort into making this look like a night scene, I was but a drooling infant when it came to coloring then. Of course now I am merely like a stumbling toddler.
In high school I didn't talk a whole lot. A bonus of this was that I wound up being a very good listener and would often hear other people's social lives described in startling detail. I recalled there was a lot of cheating always going on. Cheating or suspicion of cheating and all this shit. I figured if you're a slut on top of it all like Jodie, you have to organize that shit. Jodie is hella bisexual, but I try not to make a huge deal out of it often so it doesn't seem like something I'm just throwing in there for fanservice. When I used the name Amanda Simmons in this comic it was meant to be just some random made-up name, but eventually I decided to make it the name of the "stoner girl" who in future episodes becomes such a fan favorite. Fun fact: One of the guy names in this comic is of a real life friend of mine.
Shoes drive me nuts. I can never figure out how the tennis-shoe designers come up with the bizzare layout of their footwear. Those ones in the second panel came out fairly nice though. On the other hand, Eric's hand looks fucking wierd in that last panel. Sometimes I draw poses without actually thinking whether or not people in real life actually do that. I don't think I've ever thrown one hand up with all my fingers thrown freakishly far apart and pointed it perfectly parallel to any cameras that might be watching. It looks very unnatural, and if I sit here and actually do it, it hurts too.
I like this comic. It's awfully sparsely drawn though. That women's rally has a whopping two people at it. And Ben and that recruiter are aparrently lost in an oblivion of white. These things wouldn't be such issues if I had drawn the characters bigger. But I'll try not to be so hard on the art. It always pissed me off that when I turned 18 I had to sign up for the government to kill me at will. I always figured if you have to start forcing your own people to fight in a war, shouldn't you really be reconsidering if this war is worth it? But hey, it's always more important to save face if you're a bureaucrat who never has to see combat personally.
This one pretty much came from an almost identical conversation between some friends and I. Except the girl involved sneezed before the comment was made and wasn't a slut. Actually I figure Jodie, being as experienced as she is, is able to control the amount of noise she makes mid-coitus, but prefers to be loud when she can. I seem to put too much thought into the fuck-habits of my fictional characters, don't I?
It's a well known fact that corporate assholes in charge of food-chains do everything in their power to make the managers' lives hell. HELL. Of course, in my experience such things are done with less inadvertant filthy innuendo. It's more along the lines of "insisting that you work difficult rush hours understaffed" or "impose moronic time limits on the time it takes to make the food so that speed is valued over quality."
Oh shit! Here's something I don't think I ever noticed until now. I have at the time of this writing featured Ben's dad as a full character, and he looks NOTHING like that back-of-the-head. Back when I did this comic I never really had any plans of Ben's parents appearing any significant way so I thought nothing of drawing this generic head full of dark hair. To think that Ben's father later appears as a portly balding red-headed man makes a bit of a continuity issue. Well, just pretend that's what you see here. Anyway, I love sarcasm, and enjoy the opportunity to make nice full use of it like I have here. This comic officially begins the "School Day" storyline, which is an obscenely long single day in the comic that undergoes a rather drastic art change about halfway through. Let the fun begin!
Okay funny story about this one. Now, we all have our moments where we unintentionally rip off an idea from someone else. I've read so many Calvin and Hobbes comics in my childhood that there are times where I use a punchline almost word for word from C&H and I don't even realize it. These sorts of things are accidental and unintentional and everyone does it at some time or another. However, there is also full blown plagarism, and as it turns out I was a victim of being plagarized with this comic. It seems some internet newspaper had a person making comics for them and this individual comic copied this comic word for word and almost completely matched the artwork. Luckily this story has a happy ending, people on my forum discovered the rip-off comic and e-mailed the editor of the paper. In short order the comics of the individual who did the plagarizing were removed completely and an apology of sorts was posted. Now here's the funny part, as I write this I had recently gone on a rather long hiatus. This entire fiasco occured while I was away and I never heard about it until a couple months after it was all over. I was glad to hear that it all smoothed out without me having to step in and throw a fuss. My fans are lovely.
Have I mentioned that I love drawing Ms. Snockenflaubin? I love writing for her too! It's often the people that I find most aggravating and pretentious that are the most amusing and fulfilling to write for. So much of my life has been utterly wasted drawing stools and chairs and other dreadfully horribly dull still-life material. It wasn't until I got the balls to start fucking with what the teacher expected of me and making the art pieces into bizarre scenes such as "The Teapot Saves The Day!" that I was able to enjoy myself whilst dealing with just boring subject matter. Don't get me wrong, I know there is good reason to want to draw boring things, I just don't like how your typical fine arts teacher makes you spend such a disproportionate time working with such things.
Carrie and Jodie both have gotten a lot shorter as time went on. Though even back then I explained their relative height to other characters via them wearing high shoes/boots, they were always meant to be shorter than the other characters, but for some reason for the longest time I was loathe to draw characters with distinctly noticeable height differences. I've also realized that the curliness of Jesse's hair has become much more pronounced. Back then it looked merely wavy.
There's not a lot to say about this one. I think I did pretty good with the anatomy and perspective on Eric's right hand in panel three though. Another one of those lucky accidents I think, becaues I still have trouble with hands to this day.
I had to make a bit of a self-referential jab at myself on this one, because seriously, I don't think anybody actually does that in this day and age. Kids these days know better than to waste perfectly good alcohol on pranks when they could be drinking it themselves. And people say we don't have proper priorities. Early on, I didn't intend for there to be much drinking and/or drugs in the comic. Basically it would be known that Jodie would get drunk at parties and the other two guys would just abstain. But the characters went and changed on me again, with Jodie being the one who's a bit of a troublemaker, Eric being responsible when necessary but susceptible to suggestion very easily if he didn't have to drive, and Ben being the stubborn "straight-edge" one. Ben has the best family life, so it makes sense for him to typically be the most reluctant about such things.
If you read my 24-hour comic, I owe you an apology. Also, you may recognize that rendition of Satan from it. This version of Satan and Disco Jesus are actually refugees from another comic idea of mine that I may or may not ever get around to actually drawing. Anti-drug hysteria, about pot in particular, tends to tickle me. Propoganda just rankles me, whether it makes any good points or not. If you want somebody to stay off drugs, get them to read Requiem for a Dream, it's a much more eloquent and heartfelt way to show the dangers of habitual drug-use. Just uh... don't make them read it if they're potentually suicidal.