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 an MBA student, and is major stockholder and CEO of the biggest corporation in the world, Excalicorp.

• In the fairy tale arc, Arthur's reign is long settled down after several years of succession wars. Guenevere and Lancelot have begun their affair, aided by the machinations of Lancelot's late pal Sir Galehaut the Haute Prince of Serleuse, and by 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 the Merlin's omniscience means Arthur must know of their affair) 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 unhinged him, and he embarked on a two-year stint as a wild man in the woods after which he was nursed back to health by Elaine but then returned to Camelot. 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 emnity for Arthur; the last brother Gareth has arrived at Camelot incognito and is serving in the kitchens under the alias Beaumains ("Pretty Hands") until next Pentecost. Tristram of Lyonesse is also a Round Table knight, having been chased out of Cornwall by his uncle Duke Mark for his affair with Mark's wife Isolde. 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. Merlin has been trapped in a cave by the new Lady of the Lake, Nimue, as he had been predicting all along would happen; he didn't say it would be an accident on her part.
• 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, Gareth, Griflet, Eglante, and Arthur's foster sibling Bedivere. Because of the time-travel anomaly, Mordred is old enough to be an Excalibur knight, 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 irrational 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, after serving under Arthur on the Excalibur for years, has had a new apprentice assigned him, Nimue, and they now travel time and space in his time machine. Nimue has also infrequently visited the Excalibur from the future time when she has inherited Merlin's time machine. Usually she was 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 senior. 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 (he still draws a webcomic) 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 both now attend pre-law programs at Camelot University. Lancelot's cousin Bors is a seminary student. Both Guenevere's and Lancelot's families are more wealthy than Arthur's foster family, but not than Arthur after that he came 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 played the evil psychiatrist on Eureka and has had small and large parts in several movies and popular tv shows. Nimue was here Merlin's orphaned ward till his death. Tristram holds a masters in piano and voice from Camelot University, and leads a jazz trio which makes records and tours the country; Isolde is a doctor in Camelot; Mark is a captain of corporate industry. Morgause is in a position of power at Excalicorp, acting CEO till Arthur came into his inheritance; she acts as Arthur's mentor in the ways of corporate life during his school years. Gawaine is a senior at C.U. in computer science - he and Arthur were freshman dorm roommates, but now Arthur and Guenevere have moved in together in one of his father's mansions. Through a convoluted series of events Morgan is the gamemaster of the Friday night tabletop roleplaying game. Arthur and Guenevere are married and have one child, Mordred, and are Nimue's foster parents since Merlin's death. Guenevere and Lancelot are having an affair, and are planing on attending the same law school after graduation. Guenevere is pregnant again; she, Arthur and Lancelot have each independently realized that it's Lancelot's child. Merlin Arthur was asked to be President Obama's secretary of commerce; he declined the position but is seen to sit in on cabinet meetings.
• Tristram is male in the baseline arc, and female in the other two. Through the first 1700 cartoons Bedivere was female in the contemporary and space arcs too, but then he stopped. Tristram and Mark's wife Isolde carry on an affair whether Tristram is male or not. Kay and Bedivere remained lovers in the space arc even after Bedivere stopped being female in that arc; whether they continue to be lovers in the contemporary arc now that Bedivere stopped being female then is, since they're both in the military, something they don't tell. Gawaine's siblings Agravaine and Gareth have been seen male in the fairy tale arc and female in the space arc. Other knights' gender may 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 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. (Black pages are Arthur, King of Time and Space v2.0 - see question below or the AKOTAS-2 FAQ.)

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.

The working sabbatical had been planned to last two and a half years but only lasted six months. Nevertheless, for reasons detailed on this page, I still aged the regular AKOTAS characters those two and a half years. Skipping those two and a half years does mean that AKOTAS' original projected twenty-five year run will be truncated by that amount of time. Instead of 2029 AKOTAS is now scheduled to end in 2027 - unless there's another sabbatical ...

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 02:00 00:00-06:00 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 02:00 00:00-06:00 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.