Cast and FAQ

There's a New Reader Orientation page with about a dozen cartoons summarizing the archive.

• In the fairy tale arc Arthur is the High King of Britain in a time that's nominally the fifth century A.D. but is laced with anachronisms and fantasy.
• In the space arc Arthur is the High King of all British space during the decline of the Roman interstellar empire, and commanding officer of the starship Excalibur which is the largest and best spaceship remaining in British space.
• In the contemporary arc Arthur is a US high school graduate and started business school at college in fall 2007, and has just come into his late parents' inheritance (Arthur turned eighteen years old December 2006 in these three arcs).

• In the fairy tale arc, Arthur's reign has pretty much finally settled down after several years of succession wars against his father's allies and vassals, the Roman emperor, and the forever invading Saxons from the Continent. Guenevere and Lancelot have begun their affair, aided by the machinations of Lancelot's late pal Sir Galehaut the Haute Prince of Serleuse and Guenevere's pal Lady Eglante of Malehaut who were also lovers at the time. Arthur remains fond of them both, and has implied to the lovers (who know that Merlin's omniscience means Arthur must know of their feelings for each other) that he will not endanger the stability of the High Kingdom by exposing them. Lancelot was tricked into conceiving a child, Galahad, on Elaine of Carbonek; the combination of her machinations and Guenevere's jealousy have unhinged him, and he has embarked on what Merlin has prophesied to be a two-year stint as a wild man in the woods. Galehaute returned to his own realm and pined away for Lancelot until he died. Arthur's nephews Gawaine, Agravaine and Gaheris are Round Table knights despite their parents' past rebellion (which got their father King Lot of Lothian and Orkney killed), and their mother Morgause's continuing plots. Tristram of Lyonesse is also a Round Table knight, having been chased out of Cornwall by his uncle Duke Mark for being a better knight; Mark's barons forced him to recall Tristram once but his affair with Queen Isolde was discovered and now Tristram is in an arranged marriage to Iseult of Brittany. Arthur learned that the daughters of his father's enemy Duke Gorlois of Cornwall - Morgause, Elaine and Morgan le Fey - are his half-sisters; just after sleeping with Morgause and impregnating her with the bastard son who shall one day, according to Merlin, destroy his kingdom, Mordred. Morgan le Fey exposed herself as Arthur's enemy with a plot to steal Excalibur, and is no longer among the court at Camelot; she plots with faerie allies to become High Queen of Britain.
• In the space arc Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot are all officers aboard the starship Excalibur. Having served on the Excalibur since Arthur's crowning (instead of, as in the fairy tale arc, arriving at Camelot after the wedding) Lancelot realized he was in love with Guenevere just before she got married; as in the fairy tale arc Guenevere came to realization during their separation during Arthur's Roman campaign and the affair began during Arthur's Saxon Rock campaign. Because Morgan was Merlin's apprentice in time-traveling, she and Arthur didn't realize she was his half-sister until she was pregnant with Mordred; Merlin quickly returned her to her own time. All in the present but Merlin and Morgan (and Morgause in whom Morgan confided) remain ignorant Arthur has an heir. Morgan frankly admits to plotting to become High Queen (rather than Queen Mother), but has yet to be caught in legal proof of treason; in this time zone she also has faerie allies. Also among the Round Table knights on Excalibur are Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, Griflet, Eglante, and Arthur's foster sibling Bedivere. Because of the time-travel anomaly, Mordred is old enough to be Gawaine's squire, but no one on the Excalibur knows he's Arthur's son, not even Merlin, or Mordred himself. Galehaute served on the Excalibur for a time, until he made romantic overtures to Lancelot, whose admitted but reflexive homophobia required Galehaute to leave the ship; Galahaute pined away until he died. Lancelot, in this time zone under medication for bipolar disorder, was not driven off by the tension when Elaine of Carbonek came aboard the Excalibur for the christening of Lancelot's son Galahad; subsequently Arthur made Elaine Excalibur chaplain. Merlin's future apprentice Nimue infrequently visits him from the future time when she has inherited his time machine. Usually she is accompanied by her husband Sir Pelleas, but once by Lancelot's son Sir Galahad traveling incognito.
• In the contemporary arc Arthur is a US college sophomore. At his eighteenth birthday he came into his long-dead parents' controlling interest in Excalicorp, the biggest megacorporation in the world. Merlin, Arthur's high school art teacher and part-time boss at Merlin's comics shop, with the parents' power of attorney had him raised in a middle-class foster family so that as an adult he could run Excalicorp with the common touch. Arthur had wanted to be a cartoonist (both he and Merlin draw webcomics) but now he is majoring in business and plans to run Excalicorp. Arthur, his foster siblings Kay and Bedivere, and Merlin lived while Arthur was in high school in Springfield, a suburb of the Midwestern major metropolis Camelot. Arthur met Guenevere, Lancelot and Tristram in an online role-playing game. Lancelot is native to the east coast and Guenevere to the west, but as of January 2007 both contrived to go to school in Springfield/Camelot; Guenevere at Arthur's high school for their last semester as seniors, Lancelot (and his cousin Bors) as seminary students at Camelot University. Both their families are more wealthy than Arthur's foster family, but not than Arthur now that he's come into his inheritance. Morgan was the high school's drama teacher during Arthur's sophomore year, but she married rich and then quit teaching to go to Hollywood. She plays the evil psychiatrist on Eureka, shot in Springfield from its second season; also shooting in Springfield fall 2007 was a new Clive Craven horror movie in which Morgan stars and in which one of her co-stars is a European royal known in the press as "Galehaute the Hot Prince" who has confessed designs on Lancelot to Morgan. Merlin's future apprentice Nimue, whom he hasn't properly met in the other arcs, is here his orphaned ward. Tristram holds a masters in piano and voice from Camelot University, and leads a jazz trio which has signed a recording contract; Isolde is a doctor; Mark is a captain of corporate industry. Morgause is in a position of power at Excalicorp, probably CEO or acting CEO; she had a couple of mysterious phone calls with Merlin before Arthur's inheritance was revealed, and she acts as Arthur's mentor in the ways of corporate life. Morgause introduced Gawaine to Arthur as a sixteen-year-old high school senior - the two were freshman roommates at C.U., but now Arthur and Guenevere have moved in together in one of his father's mansions. Also, Merlin has goaded Morgause into running his regular tabletop roleplaying group, by trading on an undescribed rivalry between her and his friend Pellinore (Pellinore, in the baseline arc, killed Lot in the final battle of Lot's rebellion against Arthur's accession), though Morgause has been tiring of it lately. Arthur and Guenevere have recently announced their engagement and her pregnancy, the latter of which has prompted Lancelot to decide his latent feelings for Guenevere make him unsuited for the priesthood; he means to transfer to C.U.'s pre-law program ... where Guenevere is.
• Bedivere and Tristram are male in the baseline arc, and female in the other two. Bedivere and Kay are an item when Bedivere is female. Tristram and Mark's wife Isolde carry on an affair whether Tristram is male or not. Agravaine has been seen male in the fairy tale arc and female in the space arc. Other knights' gender will be bent across the arcs too.
• In the fairy tale/baseline arc, Morgause is Mordred's mother. In the space arc Morgan is Mordred's mother. In the contemporary arc Guenevere is going to be Mordred's mother.

Secondary arcs to date include but are not limited to the western arc, the movie parody arc, the MASH arc and the superhero arc. In the Lord of the Rings movie parody several characters were of course physically modified according to the movies' fantasy races' characteristics. In the Star Wars parody Guenevere and Morgan were combined into one character for the Princess Leia role. In the MASH arc Morgan and Nimue are male. Arcs and parodies yet to come will no doubt contain similar character manipulation.

To aid in identification across the arcs, characters' clothing is color-coded (except in the MASH arc where of course everyone mostly wears fatigues). Arthur is always in yellow or in the olive-drab that's what you get when you try to tint yellow. Guenevere's in shades of blue, Lancelot red - thus the three primary characters of the legends wear the primary colors from the color wheel. Secondary colors go to Merlin (orange), Morgan (green), and Nimue (purple). Supporting characters wear variants of their closest association's color - Gawaine in a yellow-green because he's Morgan's and Arthur's nephew, Morgause in a dark green because she's Morgan's sister but more Arthur's enemy than she, Agravaine in (most recently) Morgause-green because s/he's more Arthur's enemy than Gawaine, Tristram's bandmates in pink and red, etc. The combination Guenevere/Morgan character in the Star Wars parody wears blue-green. (For more on the reasoning behind the color-coding of the six leads see the newspost of this page.)

When Arthur, King of Time and Space pages are red instead of green, that means the day's cartoon is set sometime in the future of the cartoon's regular, current time. When Arthur, King of Time and Space pages are blue instead of green, that means the day's cartoon is set sometime in the past of the cartoons' regular, current time. Note that this displacement in time hasn't anything to do with the timeshifting between story arcs. It's relative to Arthur's time-hopping history, not absolute to time itself. There could be a red-paged fairy tale arc cartoon that's set during the Renaissance or a blue-paged contemporary arc cartoon that's set in 1976.

Retroactively, perhaps it's a separate arc when the characters step out of the frames and speak out as fictional characters, the frameless arc, but I don't track it separately in my notes. I do track separately the filler arc, comprised of the cartoons uploaded on days when I've been unable to draw a cartoon. Fillers are pulled from a reserve of cartoons created expressly for the purpose (unless the reserve is emtpy). The only format of the filler arc is that it has no format. Salutes to other webcomics were once usual.

Note this isn't a continuity strip at heart, it's gag-a-day humor. There is a story being told here, but less as an epic than a biography, or a blog; working less from a plot outline than from a calendar of landmark events. Borrowing vocabulary from Stephen King, Arthur, King of Time and Space is for the legends' breadcrumbs. If you're looking for more of the legends' meat than this (actually, even if you aren't), I recommend the Arthurian works listed in the influences paragraph below.

Originally, scheduled update time was 00:01 GMT. At the beginning of 2007 I announced in a newspost that scheduled update time would be changed to a window 02:0000:00-06:00 GMT till further notice, in anticipation of logistical difficulties that didn't actually materialize. I never retracted the change because it's less stressful this way, because midnight GMT is the dinner hour in my timezone so I frequently updated in the 02:0000:00-06:00 window anyway.

In the late 90s and early 00s I wrote stories and drew cartoons on a personal website. That material was all fanfiction, primarily of Doctor Who, Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That is, it was all fanfiction until I started globally replacing each proper noun in my Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover stories and cartoons with a proper noun from the King Arthur legend and giving the new versions the umbrella title King Arthur in Time and Space. This material of course was the progenitor of the present work. (The reason no one asked me FAQs before I composed this page is because most or all the readers I had then followed me from that website to this one, and already know all this. Many were in the blue binder cartoons.) The diskspace quota for the fanfiction site filled up after ten years, so now I update fanfiction cartoons at The Hero of Three Faces.

I scan the drawings into MSPaint (when they aren't created there) then paste up, clean up and color the strip there. Usually there's very little clean up because I don't pencil before I ink (when I ink) and I don't use preliminary construction lines (I recall astounding one or two fellow Vootie contributors with that, the one time I jammed with them in person; as well as Fred Berger when I was his student at the American Academy of Art). A weekday cartoon usually takes half an hour or an hour to execute. A Sunday cartoon there's no telling, which is why they get drawn on Saturdays.

The webcomic community in general regards MSPaint with unabashed disdain, but so far it does pretty much everything I need done. The webcomic community also dislikes the font I use, Comic Sans MS, but that appears to me an overreaction to its overuse in the long-past early days of webcomics so I ignore it. Plus, when I went online in 1995 I made a conscious decision to live my online life as much as possible through industry standard system defaults. I also handcode my websites with the HTML I know, so that I know if something goes wrong I did it and I can fix it. Consequently the work I do today can pretty much be done, with at most minor inconvenience (particularly given the files I carry around with me on a flash drive), at almost any desk in the world. (Once when I wrote this at some online forum or other the rebuttal was attempted, "Photoshop is pretty standard nowadays." I responded, "It didn't come on any of my computers.")

I've always believed in easy-loading web pages (which is why I didn't put comic strips on the web back in the dialup age as did Scott Kurtz and Pete Abrams and others who are now the old men of webcomics). Even when I learn fancier code, my look may not change much.

When I like a piece of music I'll listen to it over and over. When I started drawing a cartoon a day in 1976, I picked out the longest single piece I had in my collection, so that I'd have to turn the phonograph needle back least often while drawing. In that way the alltime theme for my daily cartoons became the Ballet for a Girl from Buchanan suite on Chicago II.

When I finally started buying CDs almost the first thing I did was rectify the total lack up till then in my music collection of Vince Guaraldi Peanuts music. If and when Arthur, King of Time and Space is animated for the screen, its theme will be Greensleeves arranged for jazz trio.

I hope to eventually offer print collections of the cartoons despite their low resolution. Some browsing at Lulu.com in 2006 made me much more optimistic that this will eventually happen. At the moment I'm thinking of best-of collections every five years.