Diogee’s Broken?

Heh-heh, now this week’s strip has a really funny story behind it…

Generally speaking, the way I’ll do a strip is sit down with a blank, four panel template, doodle out the characters and what they are doing, and write out the dialogue in my chicken scratch (a full blog illustrating this process is forthcoming). Then I’ll show it to Marc and he’ll make his suggestions, determining  the best way to lay it out on the page or if it’s suitable for illustration at all, and we go back and forth until we have it fleshed out.

In this case however, I sat down with the template, stared at it for a while, then drew Ben and Devin standing in the backyard. Then I wrote some dialogue. Ben says to Devin, “Devin, I’ve got some terrible news!”, to which Devin replies, “What is it?” After that, I went to the second panel and stared at it. Then I stared some more. Then, some more. I stared at it for about an hour and came up with absolutely nothing. Zilch. Zip. Nada.

I knew there was a good strip that could work off of that line, but it just wasn’t coming to me. So, I stuck it away and showed it to Marc at one of our creative meetings. Upon seeing it, he shook his head and laughed. He said something to the effect of “Is That It?” I laughed and said, “Yep, but I know there is a good strip in there somewhere!” After a few minutes, Marc came up with the idea of Ben saying, “Diogee’s broken!” As soon as he said that I knew exactly where he was going with it. I also have to say it again, especially after this stellar finished product, that I really, really love Diogee. Just look at that face in the last panel!

The boys aren’t really dreaming up any big adventure here; it’s not a space-themed strip or part of an overall saga but I think a really funny one-off gag, and I hope you all enjoy it. We’re right in a middle of a bunch of these one-shot strips, but in a couple weeks we have another story “arc” that introduces a new character. Stay tuned!