The Battlebarge

20 June 2006

Bigger...longer...and uncut!

It's a wierd format, I know. It's the scripted strips for about the next month with a bit of filler inbetween, all stuck together in this odd format as a homage to one of the strips that inspired me to actually start doing this thing...

Framed!!! was a unique strip, in my opinion. Instead of a cartoon set in a cartoon world, you had real people thrown into a comic, fully aware of who and what they were. It set my imagination going and it had a resonance with the sort of real-world humour I wanted to do.

My comic hasn't broken the fourth wall (yet!), but with Framed there was NO fourth wall - the writer was a character in the comic, and the characters often found that messing with him has consequences. It was a real eye-opener to what could be done with a comic world without the restriction of separating fantasy from reality. Often he would mess with the traditional format of the comic and create long, sweeping, snaking, disjointed panels just to mess with the reader's sense of what was the norm. Not to mention the fact that the story split apart into three timestreams at one point, all of which reconnected and snaked apart again later! It was truly an interesting couple of days catching up with those archives.

From there, Damonk (the author) transferred those same characters, complete with thier knowledge of who and what they were, to a complete fantasy realm and began an epic story complete with a cast of unique and witty characters and a new, more in-depth, drawing style. Naught Framed took the Framed setting and turned it on his head. And you know what? It worked too!

Framed and Naught Framed are two totally different comics that happen to share the same central characters. I've never seen this scope of reimagining before in comics, either web-based or published, and even the reboots of major comics doesn't come close.

So why, you may ask, am I paying homage to a comic I told you all months ago had died? Well, much to my delight, Damonk has finally returned to the world he created and is carrying on the story! I confess that I was one of apparently many who badgered his wife to poke him back into the comic world, and whether or not it was her prompting that did the deed, he has picked up his pen again and is doing his level best to keep the story going. And a fine job he's doing too.

Damonk himself was kind enough to reply to an email I sent him thanking him for returning to Framed, and he was very complimentary about BB, so I thought I would take a leaf from his book and depart a little from the normal format of the comic today. So a big shout to Damonk and a "Hell Yeah" for the return of Framed!!!

See you next week!