Famous Last Words

posted to Nightmare Before Christmas by Joe (9:37 p.m., March 30, 2010)

A few nights ago I called Lizzy up at about eleven o'clock at night with worries and concerns about what the future had in store. School, life, just about anything. We've known each other for a good eight years or more now and I'm proud to say we have a good thing going when it comes to talking to one another. Now, it wasn't necessarily about the grand scheme of things that I called her -- I called her to ask what I should do with the comic. We came to one conclusion -- end it.

One of my favorite comics back in the day was a little strip called Counter Culture, by Omi and JawaBoy. It was hilarious, had great art, and I could really dig the characters, everything from their appearances to their own personal little quirks. After some long distances between updates and some random fillers, they announced they were going to stop drawing Counter Culture. They were kind and said that maybe that'd pick it up again if things in their lives evened out, and sure enough they did for a couple of months. The art was better than ever, the jokes were still shit-your-pants funny, but once again, things became few and far between. One day, a black image came up where the new strip would've been, and drawn in a white outline were both of the characters waving good-bye. In the middle, between them, were two simple words: Thank you.

As silly as it sounds, I'll never forget that. Unlike most projects on the internet, rather than just up and quit and go about their business, leaving the few readers and fans it has to wonder what happened, they took the time to write out big long newsposts telling their reasons for quitting and they were kind enough to draw something, one final something, saying they were done. They gave it their best shot -- twice, for Chrissakes -- and they had the courage to know when they were beat.

When I started 362's internet incarnation, it was the summer of my sophomore year in college. I recall it often as probably the last real "summer vacation" I've had, where the days stretched on forever and the nights were warm with sweet-smelling breezes. Even though there wasn't really any extra time, it felt like there was more time. It was a more forgiving time for such a crazy idea as an online comic strip. I leapt into the idea with reckless abandon, dreaming that soon I'd be among the ranks of Greg Dean, Tycho and Gabe, and Hawk, with a cavalcade of readers. I got Chance on board and Bobby and Lizzy soon followed. 362 was born.

Somewhere down the line though, I think I tried too hard. I put too much into it, too many hair-brained ideas, like trying to fit an elephant into a thimble, and expected it to work out. It didn't. I got discouraged, put down my pen, and called it a day. Chance and I, in his basement back at his parents' house, decided that we should give it one more go. I called it a reboot, I claimed it would be different, but I realized it wasn't. I'm not the type to easily let go of something. Even though I said that all the crazy storyline stuff we did would be considered non-canon, I couldn't make myself believe that. I threw the characters into a new apartment, tried to make new stuff happened, and I had to ask myself how they got there, what happened in the meantime, and wanted to try and explain it all. Maybe I should have, but I didn't. To me, the later comics feel stale as a result. To me, they just don't have the magic of the earlier strips. Somewhere, the magic stopped.

I realized not too long ago that when I sat down to draw the comics, I started to get a headache. I got sick to my stomach. I felt like when I drew, I was drinking sour milk. When this happened, I was terrified. I had to ask myself, "What happened? This used to give me so much joy, why do I hate it so much?" I discovered it's hard to draw when you feel like everything you draw is shit. I realized that a lot of the drawings, some of them really complicated, that I wanted to do, I made them simple, made them easier, and by that point it just wasn't as cool as it was in my head. I still have this problem. When I make something with the intent to put it on display, I catch myself not taking risks, not wanting to fuck it up like I'm certain I would. I did a lot of things with a lot of different ideas, and I had a lot of people say they blew and some people say they really enjoyed it. Especially the backgrounds. Personally? I loved them. I loved the idea of having the characters running around in the real world with the rest of us. Some people said it was shit. I came up with some half-ass excuse that maybe I was trying to cut corners -- and to a degree I was -- but even though it originally started as me trying to save time, it was one of those accidental great ideas in my opinion. Justin and I would run around taking pictures of campus and everything else and then run a couple Photoshop filters and bam! We had something magical in a comic strip. Something uncanny. I could dig it.

At this point though, even though he was one of the people who disagreed with the photograph backgrounds, Carwin suggested that maybe I was caring too much about what all the people I'd thrown into the project thought. Too many cooks and whatnot. I didn't want to think that. I'd chosen, asked these people to help me with it and they had! I didn't want to think that somehow the comic was made worse as a result. In my mind, I couldn't cut them out anyway. After all, they were characters in the strip! Why shouldn't they have a say as to what their dudes were doing? Hell, it's not like they were bossing me around any. Finally though, I came to realize what he was trying to tell me. I was losing the amount of freedom I had with the characters by making them caricatures of real people. Real people, with real quirks, real opinions, and real goals. I couldn't handle them all. There was a lot of tension there. The comic Joe and comic Lizzy probably could've been in a relationship, but that would've made things awkward with the real us. If I got upset at the real Chance or Bobby or vice versa, should I draw it in the strip? What would that do to our real relationship with each other?

It got strange. It got clunky. It got absurd, and not in the way I wanted it to be. 362 was in its death throes and I was beating it WITH a dead horse. Finally, I just stopped drawing it. I stopped drawing it, but I haven't been able to get it off my mind.

We had a good run. I have no qualms about that. At this point though, I feel that I've done all I can with these four characters in this particular iteration. I really don't know. Is this the last time you'll ever see Joe, Chance, Bobby, or Lizzy? Probably not. Will the website vanish? As it is now, perhaps. I've been playing around with the idea of making it into a blog, or some sort of gaming news site for us to work on. Justin likes to use it to experiment with his coding and he's the one who pays for it after all, so I can't really just say "Oy, shut it down." I don't want to. We have this little corner of the internet, we've staked it out as our own, and goddammit we're gonna keep it. It just won't have a comic here, maybe not for a long time.

Do I still make comics? Hell yes. Carwin and I are making some surprising headway into a new webcomic/comic book called Electri City, and I'll be sure to let you guys know when that comes to fruition. I'm writing it, he's drawing it, and let me tell you -- I personally think the stories are phenomenal and his art style is amazing. You won't be disappointed if you want to follow us onto that project.

As for the actual fearsome foursome? Chance, Bobby, Lizzy and I are, have been, and always will be 362. If you see that logo on it, unless someone was really hard-up on some people to masquerade as, chances are it'll be one of us.

See you space cowboy.

Joe out.