My first comic for FA can be seen here. I'm not super pleased with the art--I whipped it up really quickly shortly after the ad came out and didn't spend too much time on it. I am quite pleased with the comic as a whole though.

I actually used Toon Boom Studio to draw it. I purchased the animation suite a few months back with the intention of some day adding rudimentary animated cartoons to my arsenal of weapons against the absurd. I suppose you'll probably hear more about my progress on that front in coming days on this blog.

I found Toon Boom to be a huge time saver, since you can draw a few elements, then re-use them in different panels by simply rearranging them slightly and changing the camera angle and zoom level. It's a technique that I strictly avoided back in my Cectic days (prefering instead to draw each frame by hand even when they were essentially identical), but like I said I wanted to finish this one quickly so that it could go up while the ad was still timely. The fact that it's the first real project I've done in Toon Boom also contributes to the roughness of the art.

My favorite response to this comic was (I believe) a comment on Reddit, expressing great dismay that the comic was merely a re-wording of Rick Perry's actual ad--I hadn't changed the core message at all. So true, and so sad.

On the topic of Reddit, this comic got some love over there when it got posted. I really enjoy seeing my stuff pop up there spontaneously. I enjoy it so much, in fact, that I never post my own comics there myself--it's much more gratifying to see it pop up on its own, and I don't mind spreading the karma around to others with my work. The thing that doesn't particularly give me warm fuzzies inside, however, is when people link just the image, or even worse re-host the image on imgur and post that. Back in my Cectic days I didn't care too much because I wasn't making any money from the website, but Friendly Atheist is another story, and by directly linking the posts instead of the images you're helping to ensure that the blog and all of its contributors can continue putting out the fresh, original content that you've all grown to trust and love.