in Thoughts 448 Words

Rocks

Reading this week:

  • To the Central African Lakes and Back, Vol I by Joseph Thomson

I need an easy post this week, so I shall revisit the creative output of my past. Back in high school I drew a webcomic called Rocks. It was about rocks. The precise reasons for this escape me but a friend of mine had sent me a list of things webcomic artists shouldn’t do so I did them. I wound up drawing well over a hundred of these comics, so only a fraction of the total output is represented below. This was the point in my life where I looked forward to Friday night because I would watch Stargate SG-1 and drink a lot of caffeine and stay up all night coding HTML and PHP for my website which back then, much like today, nobody read. I had a lot of fun. Here’s the cast of characters for my little comic:

Our #1 rock, the star of the show, is Rocky. He came unto the scene as a former pet rock, abandoned by his master on the side of the trail. He’s a little irregularly shaped, but that just adds to his infinite charm.

To Rocky’s far left is his fine friend Shale. Shale’s pretty regularly shaped, but as he explains, that’s because his dad was a quartz. We don’t know exactly where Shale has been, or how he came to be here, but he does have a penchant for scaring hikers.

Finally, smack dab in the center, is Chad. Chad is semi-circular, and wears glasses. Where he got the glasses, no one knows, but he wound up in the bunch after a bird mistook him for something edible. Plus, with a name like Chad, you can’t go wrong.

Rocks started out with a episodic storyline:

After that the episodic nature of the comic petered out. I tried to do a lot of different things with my three panels and three characters, but looking back it really shined when it leaned into the fact it was about rocks:

(I’m less proud of this “plastic” joke these days)

At various points however it just went fully surreal:

And then finally one day I drew my very last Rocks and never again picked up my webcomic pen:

Sometimes I consider revisiting Rocks but I never have. I just repost them on the internet every once in a while to relive my long-haired glory days of webcomic almost-fame. I think I mined the very depths of rock-based webcomic humor the first time around, but Hollywood loves a reboot so maybe there’s a chance to tread new ground. Only time will tell.

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