8/22/2014
"Picasso said the greatest artist was the one who could draw three lines and make a bull. That's what you do - you give us life in three lines." Carl Reiner to Charles Schulz, 1975
I started drawing a cartoon a day on April 19, 1976 when I was sixteen and a sophmore in high school. It was what webcomic culture now calls a journal comic: depicting the cartoonist, his real life buddies, and some invented characters dealing with issues ranging from everyday frustrations to dark lords with spacefleets. This being some twenty years before the internet, I carried them around in a blue three-ring binder and people read them at school and at parties. They lasted about two decades, with occasional hiatuses. Not, for a long time, into the internet age; because I can't maintain interest in daily journal comics without a large local reader base to draw into them, which I haven't had since before the last time I changed cities.
I first wrote and had published Star Trek fanfiction in the early 70s and Doctor Who fanfiction in the early 80s. Several stories featured the Enterprise crew or the Doctor crossing to other "fiction-planes" to visit other favorite tv characters. Fanfiction characters frequently appeared in my daily blue binder cartoons as well, starting April 22, 1976 with a strip featuring Hawkeye and B.J. from M*A*S*H. About 1990 I self-published a fanzine of Doctor Who crossover cartoons and one of a Star Trek: The Next Generation novella. About 1992 I self-published a video (VHS) Star Trek and Doctor Who fanzine made up of animated cartoons created on an Amiga 500; for other, unpublished animations I had created a drawing style I called "triangle caricatures" to simplify character design.
When I first got on the internet in 1995, I decided (in the single decision of my creative life I'd go back and reverse if I could) working in graphics instead of prose wasn't supported well enough to be practical for a daily or weekly feature. My fanfiction postings and my website were text-only till 1999. When I started drawing cartoons for the internet, my first internet fanfiction comic strips were serializations of stories I'd started outlining while still working in prose, but once I ran out of outlines mid-2000 I reverted to the stand-alone panel gags which had always been my staple before. 1995 to 2005 my prose and cartoon fanfiction was posted or advertised, respectively, on Usenet; and archived on a website of my own. In 2001 when I spent a few months without a scanner, I updated the Amiga 500 triangle caricature style from the previous decade in order to draw fanfiction comic strips in MSPaint, and I like the style enough (despite complaints and even insults) that my fanfiction cartoons have been done that way ever since.
In 2004 inspired by such online comics as Megatokyo and PvP, I started Arthur, King of Time and Space as a conventional daily webcomic; for "conventional" read "wholly my own intellectual property". I chose the Arthurian corpus because it's the one set of characters I love best which doesn't fall under someone else's copyright. One of the things AKOTAS has taught me is that I do, after all, get my best inspiration and satisfaction working with characters that do happen to fall under someone else's copyright. This is just fine with me, actually, since I believe in the worth of fanfiction to a degree that going into it here would fling this history off its subject. In 2005, consequent of the demands of AKOTAS, triangle fanfiction adopted a part-panel-gag/part-sketch format. Where in prose and panel gag fanfiction crossovers I'd always aligned different shows' chronologies by production date, in sketches I prorated the chronologies (see diagrams below). In 2007 when new triangle fanfiction started appearing at the free hosting at WebcomicsNation.com (for the first time under the title The Hero of Three Faces), panel gags also took on prorated chronology; and, in a major continuity change, instead of all shows existing in the same timeline or universe as they'd done since 1995, now each show lived on its own fiction-plane which the space/time-traveling characters crossed between as in my fanzine-published fanfiction of the 20th century. In 2010 and 2011 triangle fanfiction converted back to production date crossover chronology; also, now hosted as a subdirectory at AKOTAS, it permamently adopted the single-panel-per-screen website format that I had already experimented with occasionally, and continued to fiddle with offline.
I finally succumbed to my wife's requests for an online revival of my journal comic, so I could put our grandchildren into it, at the beginning of 2012. It went on the AKOTAS site under the weekly title Creative Process, because I suspected it would be at least as much about the process of drawing my other two webcomics. (In fact our grandchildren never did appear, EDIT and Creative Process is now concluded.)
While I haven't drawn a cartoon every day since 1976, there've been many days I've drawn more'n one, even when they were on paper; and I choose to believe it averages out.
In early 2014 I noticed that my online fanfiction has a tendency to reboot itself in format and/or continuity at five year intervals: I first got online in 1995, and elected to put out serialized fanfiction in prose instead of cartoons. By 1999-2000 my internet fanfiction was coming out in comic strips rather than prose. 2004-2005 was when AKOTAS started and fanfiction triangles switched to part-sketch format with prorated chronology and multiple fiction planes. About 2010 was the switch back to realtime chronology, and the switch to panel-per-screen format.
By 2014 I had refined the panel-per-screen format quite a bit into a slideshow type of format providing limited animation instead of panels, though without actually implementing it on the website, and wanted to be working on a project incorporating all my ideas all across every cartoon in the project. Converting the whole Three Faces site to date with more than nine hundred and fifty cartoons would have been a very long-term project, when all I've ever learned of website coding is HTML I picked up in 1997, enhanced here and there by code I've searched for on the internet such as the slideshow code. Then I noticed the five-year pattern and realized some new version of Three Faces was due shortly already. So as of cartoon baaa - the thousandth 1001th cartoon, coming out of the 2014 annual summer hiatus - The Hero of Three Faces is building an entirely new continuity in crossovers and in the new slideshow format. We will find out how much of pre-baaa continuity will carry over as we go along.
The nature of the relationship between the chronologies of the properties appearing in Hero of Three Faces story cartoons changed as of cartoon aapv, as described in cartoon aapv. Until cartoon aapv, properties' timelines in The Hero of Three Faces related as in this diagram:
