Planet B made its debut on DeviantArt and Smackjeeves in mid-2007. It was one of three spinoffs of “Zoldon, Komataso”, and it was the first time I had dedicated myself to a regular update schedule. I kept it at a stress-free two days a week.
1. HOLY CRAP, WORDS. Lots of them.
2. Anyone got a computer monitor 2000 px wide?
3. Hey! Now we know all the main characters. Great! …oh. There’s still 14 more strips to go.
Funny little illustration, and a welcome relief from the avalanche of words. Big rule of comics: If you can say it well with pictures instead of words, do so.
Drawing interdimensional travel is the most fun.
Take that, language dilemma.
Notice I gave up on shading that one. I spent a lot of time trying to find out how to make black and white look good. It turns out, that’s a much harder task than it seems; color is easier in some ways!
I feel like RZ is out of character here. He’ll argue when pressed, but he usually doesn’t speak out on his own. I do love that epithet “Toilet seat head” though. I’ll have to use that again sometime. Also, I liked the idea of having a single line of continuity binding all the arcs; their next goal was already in the air.
This introduced Spitz, who we don’t see again until here. Hex is supremely out of character here too – he’d take all the credit and then some.
So now they’ve got to introduce an economy to Planet B. I guess they didn’t have one yet? Well we’ll get on that. But first, an intermission!
Mark challenged me to do a strip where everybody sang, and it’s my favorite out of these.
So here’s where the second arc officially began, and where I started to realize that I didn’t have the patience to read the kind of comic I had been making so far!
Nobody talks like Furato talks in that last one.
Are hexagonal speech bubbles lazy? Yes. But I like them. And I think it’s a good alternative if one can’t do traditional bubbles well.
Much like the issue of alien language vs english, I didn’t want to deal with all the implications of alien/human interaction. It’s easier and smoother to just have people treat them like they would anyone else.
But guhhh, was I seriously resorting to the “EXTREME TO THE MAX” cliche that ceased to be funny 10 years ago? …well then again, I liked this particular phrase enough to use it in the new intro. The comic is set around the turn of the century, anyway.
Still makes me laugh. :)
Aaah, 680×800. I made it to fit the Smackjeeves template and still use it today. It may seem boring to make all your comics the same size, but if I had from the start, it would have saved me some headaches.
“At what rate do we recieve wages?” Oh Hex, you showoff. I bet that got you beat up after school.
I can’t take credit for inventing that prank. :)
I don’t know why I didn’t just say fur coats. I think I wanted to highlight that he wasn’t buying his own species’ fur, but it didn’t help – nobody knew what a poonta was. So I thought some explanation was in order.
Thus the Encyclopedia Astaralgia was born! (This one’s also in the main archives.)
Ok DJ, seriously. Extreme 90’s was forgivable, fast food jokes tolerable. But LAWYERS? Don’t you see? This is turning into today’s newspaper comics!
Thankfully, that didn’t last long. Even more thankfully, NO MORE HELMETS! I was sick of drawing those things. Sometimes they looked like glued-on hairstyles.
The name Sequin came from anagramming “antiques” to get “at Sequin”.
After this, I took a break and spent November noveling.
And now you know how I got into this mess!