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The year is 1994, and I am scribbling bored in between my notes in class at school. I'm drawing a moustache, then some hair. Then a tie. And I realise I've created a character...
I started drawing Maak Het Verhaal Af En Kleur De Plaatjes in the last few months of 1994. I drew seven full pages, each with five strips, before New Year. In 1995 I added quite a number of other strips to them, but I soon preferred to work on Opgedragen Aan Een Zieke Maatschappij, which is also to be found in the PROBEERSEL.COM page.
The original material I drew in those days can be found here, but in 1997, I decided to redo the comic.. in a different way. I went digital. It was my first comic to be stored in a computer.
For the transition to the digital version I used a program that my good friend Tom made, and that until then was only used for me to make animation images for the games we made. It was called TCPMP, which meant Turbo C Picture Making Program. Hey, the name worked, ok :P ?
The good old days... it was all still DOS then, no bluescreens, nothing :) and making a comic digital meant pixel by pixel. Actually, TCPMP was pretty advanced for an own-made imaging program. You can see that for yourself in the following screengrabs: 1 2. I'd put it up to download but I doubt it is of any use to anyone.
I then screengrabbed the images with the oldfashioned WordPerfect 5.1 GRAB program.. and oldfashioned as it all may sound, it worked :)
I made a WP51 file with all the re-done strips and published quite a lot of the strips again later in BlindSight.
When I started making my (ew, GeoCities..) first homepage, the WP-file turned up ZIPped under downloads, and has always been a download on my page, even when I switched to XOOM. I did update the file though, by saving it in WP6.0 format.
Then recently (I'm writing this in October 2000) I decided to rip the images from the WP-file and give this comic it's own little site, so I started crackin' on that. You're looking at the results :).. A friend from online helped me find a fontmaking program so I could turn the specially-made 'font' that I used in the pictures into an actual font to make the translation into English a little easier. Maybe I'll upload it here sometime, when I add more characters to it.
Then another friend mentioned recently the idea of adding a sort of add-your-own concept to it.. which sounds very intruiging, though technological hugely over my head right now. But, you never know, maybe in the faraway future :)
That pretty much sums up the history of the comic.. I hope you enjoy(ed) reading it.
CHARACTERS
There are many, and all nameless, characters that I used in the original version of this comic. For the digital version I only salvaged a few. I have listed them all here, even though some have only appeared in like, one picture ever.
  First of all, of course, there is the main character. He's the employee.
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  Then there was originally a first boss. In the original, the employee fires him in strip 5 *grin*.
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  Of course, then, there had to be a second boss. He stayed.
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  A number of times the main character finds himself lying on the sofa at this psychiatrist's office. Of course, as with most psychiatrists, the sanity of the good doctor remains at question, too.
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  This sweet looking kiddo was introduced to annoy the hell out of pretty much all the characters. He is evil incarnate in the body of a young smartass boy. I have to admit I liked using his character every now and then.
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  There was a robber in a few of the strips. Oddly enough, I managed to make him a likable character.
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  I have to correct something here. Not all characters were nameless. This adorable doggy had a name in both the original and the digital version. The dutch name was Bello, and for the translation i called him Pooch. Either way, it's a lean mean growlin' machine.
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  At the time, I sucked bigtime at drawing women. Not that I'm an ace at it now, but, you have got to admit that this poor woman who's asking the main character out in one of the strips, ended up looking better in the digital version. She only appeared in two pictures.
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UNSALVAGED CHARACTERS:
 This tall guy was one of the employee's coworkers. He never spoke, and I doubt I made him appear all that much.
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 This bearded coworker actually spoke in a few pictures.
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 I never did figure out what I wanted this guy to be. In the original version of the strips at the party (of which I only salvaged the first for the digital version) he's one of the guests, which I guess should make him a coworker. Later on in the comic he also appears in a more policeman-kind of way, driving the main character away who's living in the gutter at that moment. So.. you tell me *grin*.
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 This doctor was friendly enough to laugh in the employee's face when the latter told him he had accidentally swallowed a beer bottle.
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 This boring-looking bald guy was the employee's employment agent... hey, with the number of times he gets fired, he has to show up at the employment agency sometime now, doesn't he ?
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 On two occasions a foreigner of unknown origin appeared, preferrably speaking very, very bad dutch. I never did manage to make him interesting.
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 Then there was this character who I had appear, I think only once.. He was supposed to be the employee's brother.. so many characters, so many possibilities, now that I look back on it *smiles* ohwell...
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 And last, but certainly not least, the mentioning of the fact that later on in the 1995 comics a woman appeared who, probably as a surprise to the reader, turned out to be the employee's wife. Again, I never really did much with the potential of this character.
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Not bad, after all... 50% of the characters survived the transition to the digital version *grin*. |
