In Ze Beginning

It all started on January 10, 2000. I'd found a weird heavy-handed religious webcomic called "Theophilus" and decided to alter it slightly by erasing the actual captions and putting new captions in, matching the font exactly and conforming to the word bubbles already there. Some of the words I used were swears. It was a bit of a hit, so I decided to do some more.

The first 9 or so Catatonic Comix were released all at once and advertised as part of my old spatch.ne.mediaone.net site. When I put up comix #10-12 on February 3, I gave the site its own domain and happily started on a career of weekly "comic" production, taking online pictures of celebrities and whatnot and making them say dirty words. At the time it was great because I was working at Compaq in Marlboro and could easily take time out of my busy workday to sit at my fancy workstation and tool around with Photoshop and still get some Perl writing done when I needed to. I'd mail the files to myself at the end of the day and put them up by Thursday. And little by little it took off.

Tools and the Tooling Tools who Use Them

I primarily used two fine Adobe products for the work: Photoshop for the preliminary picture-futzing, if a picture needed it, and ImageStyler for the dialogue balloons and text and title treatments. I found ImageStyler to be a fast and painless way to throw text up on a picture with great ease, whereas with Photoshop, adding text is pretty much like using a 20-pound sledgehammer to drive a picture frame nail into sheetrock.

The dialogue font is known as Annifont and was the cleanest all-caps comic-like font I could find at the time, though it's since been eclipsed by something else whose name escapes me at the moment (though I use the new font for the Hilarious! webcomic.) The Catatonic Comix logo font is known as Foo. The official Catatonic red is #FF0000, which of course breaks all known rules of website design for whatever reason. (Look, Ma, it's my first colophon!)

Sucks To Your Dog-mar

I had a few internal rules that I swore to keep as I worked on the project (now called "The Comix" in my head cause it sounded infinitely cooler, see also Craig Kilborn calling The Daily Show "The Daily") and these rules both helped and hindered my creative journey. But I'm still proud I stuck to most of 'em.

Rule #1: This is a non-profit comic site. Don't sell out.
There are those who may consider this artistic dogma, but it actually was really more practical than that. Since I was dealing more or less with copyrighted images ganked from Yahoo! News (or, worse, the Corbis archives) I knew I'd be on really shaky legal ground should one of them notice the site and ruin my fun with a C&D or a XYZPDQ or whatever. Even with a real clever disclaimer at the bottom of the index page.

This meant the site lay low. Real low. With as little promotion as possible. I rarely advertised the Comix myself, with the exception of some link exchange mechanism with Keenspot and the Bigpanda comic list. This didn't faze me, actually, as most of my projects gain momentum through word-of-mouth and bloggers. Sometimes I don't have to do any kind of self-promotion at all, and that suits me just fine.

I also couldn't do much merchandise-wise, seeing as how using copyrighted images for your own profit is a no-no, though I did sneak out a limited-edition Britney Spears coffee mug thru Cafepress cause I enjoyed the concept so much. Didn't get in trouble.

Rule #2: Remove the Personal as much as possible.
This rule mostly came about because I really dislike most webcomics. On the whole, the genre is intensely creator ego-driven, and the creators usually insinuate themselves into the strip as much as possible.

This can be accomplished as subtly as including a daily "News" item attached to each comic which serves more as a LiveJournal entry than actual site News, or as blatant as writing oneself into the strip and thus expressing one's personal views through the dialog bubble. I didn't care too much for that. I wanted the humor in my stuff to be the focus, first and foremost, without the LJ drama and whatnot.

"Now wait!" I hear you cry. "That's what webcomics are all about! And you must admit, writing a socio-political comic by making famous people say bad words clearly demonstrates a show of opinion on your part." And I concede that yes, that's true. My opinions and views are baked right in to each delicious comic cookie. But, and this is where I maintain that I maintain creative individuality here, they're very very very rarely baked with first-person pronouns involved. I really didn't care that the views expressed were those of Rob Noyes, I just cared that they were, well, just expressed. By someone. By the strip itself. By Laffent.

The conceit was that Catatonic Comix was created and run by Laffent Technologies, a web-based "humor solutions" company which provided "sequential art product" and involved many many employees. Just another useless dot-com, really, and a pretty decent spoof while I was at it. This allowed me to make asides from the cartoonist, sure, but not credit them personally to me. They were just the Company's asides. I dunno, I kinda liked the concept that way, though in 2002 I altered the "About the Author" page to actually include some personal information. Because, really, you can only keep the mystery up for so long.

Amusingly enough, I have attended various web-like conferences and trade shows as a Laffent representative. My favorite badges actually say Laffent Technologies Humor Solutions on them -- and nobody batted an eye as I strolled the convention floor ganking freebies left and right. But then again, that was 2000, and everybody was a dot-commer then.

Rule #3: Do it for as long as it's fun. Do it only while it's fun.
Easy enough rule to make. Hard rule to follow. I petered out creatively in the middle of 2001, and not just because I'd run out of funny ideas. You really can't run out if you keep up with your entertainment and political news and check the news picture sites every day for funny things. But I'd gotten laid off from Compaq along with all the other contractors in my department and I was living the indigent life of an unemployed schmoe. It's funny how your work ethics go to pot and you forget how to keep schedules when you're unemployed. Days sort of blend into one another and Thursday loses all meaning, and why bother anyway if you're not making money off it? (That's where Rule #1 clashed with Rule #3. Suddenly when I wasn't actually getting paid to do other things, my attention wanted desperately to focus on stuff I could do that would pay.) And honestly, in 2001, nothing was fun anymore. So I gradually stopped off.

There was a brief revival in early 2002 as I tried to get things back on track, but then tragedy struck and the catatonic-comix.com domain was hijacked by a squatter who noticed the domain had expired right before I did. (I protest, I was in the middle of a goddamned move for crying out loud.) My attempt to regain the domain in 2003 was thwarted by yet another squatter. And so it goes.

Welcome Back Comix.

Well, maybe it's fun again. Welcome back to the ol' Catatonic Comix, and you'll see that for purposes of readjusting and removing of dead link cruft, almost everything looks the same. Except for the annotations. So enjoy this quality humorous sequential art product. And try not to cry too much. Pretend I've already done your crying for you.