In many of the promotional materials for this comic (including the placeholder strip above!), Act Natural was given a launch date of “Summer 2011″. With the end of Summer 2011 rapidly approaching, it’s probably time to give an update.
Act Natural’s launch date is being revised to “2011″. It will not be out this Summer, but will definitely be out this year. The reason for this, however, is actually very cool – read on!
When I was doing Jimmy and the Hammer, what wound up killing me was how long it would take me to do the art. My writing kept requiring more and more complicated things, and my art had progressed to the point that I could see things I had drawn wrong, but it took me hours of work to correct them. I couldn’t do the art quickly enough to tell that story. So I put Jimmy and the Hammer on ice, and started looking for a new idea.
That idea would become Act Natural. The concept was simple, the comic would mainly be talking heads, drawn in 3/4 perspective, 3 panel gags. By doing this, I would be able to effectively copy/paste a lot of the art, and could “draw” a strip as quickly as I could write one. My creative flow would be in sync again.
I loved this idea, and I was confident. So I threw my hat over the fence, announced that I would be launching in as few as 3 months.
Then I made the first panel, using my predrawn characters. It took over an hour. And on top of that, it was wrong and i went back after I finished and did another hours worth of tweaks. Then, the second panel took just as long – and on top of that, looked very static next to the first panel. Each of my characters was drawn well, but they were just standing there. They weren’t emoting. They weren’t, as the subject matter might suggest, acting.
So I scrapped the predrawn idea and decided to draw each panel from scratch, but to still keep them simple and to draw them fast. And that was okay too for a while, but the art very quickly deteriorated before I finished the third strip. I could tell that would be a problem too.
So after a few nights of despair and heavy drinking I had an epiphany. The idea that should have been a no brainer from the start:
Someone else will be drawing Act Natural.
There’s some contract stuff that still isn’t finalized, so I’m not going to announce who I’ll be working with just yet, only that I found someone, and am VERY excited to work with them. Act Natural is going to kick ass in a way that I would never be able to draw. I appreciate any fans of my artwork, but trust me, working with an artist will, by far, provide a superior product.
It also means, that we’re basically starting from scratch. My scripts that I’ve written are still good to go, but we will be redoing all the art, and we want to get a bunch of strips done and ready before we launch, so we won’t be launching “Summer 2011″, but it will be launching this year, and when it does, hold on to your butts!