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Thanks for reading.

5/28/04

I had a week's cartoons drawn ahead last Friday when the first cartoon went live, and several days scripted ahead of that. Since then I've been drawing one a day to maintain a week's cushion. Last Wednesday (which is to say next Wednesday's gag) was the first day I hadn't already scripted a gag for.

I have plenty of gags scripted; just none suited for next Wednesday, smack in the middle of Arthur, King of Time and Space's first medieval week (as the current week is a space week). The medieval arc in Arthur, King of Time and Space is to be an important piece of the overall work: I want it to be set in the fictional universe of (pardon the oxymoron) the real legends - that is, as faithful a rendering as daily gag panels can render of a corpus of classical romances that sometimes contradict each other. I want to give the reader a baseline from which to evaluate (to the degree any given reader cares) how much in the other arcs is my own deviation. But I was a little worried because, much as I love the Matter of Britain, I haven't any practice in regular writing of gags in a medieval and/or sword-and-sorcery milieu. This was my challenge on the first day I must write a gag from scratch in order to keep a week ahead.

I ended up writing three or four. Though I say it who shouldn't, one of them (the one for a week from today) had me chortling the rest of the day.

It may be that none of the gags I wrote Wednesday possess any quality that inherently makes it a medieval arc gag, except circumstantially, since the gags're all built around the theme of Arthur dealing with his subject kings. That could be transposed into another setting, except that's something he isn't doing in other arcs in quite the way he had to do in the legends. (For instance, this week in the space arc, Arthur abandons the capitol entirely in the company of the four most important people of the rest of his life, leaving the ruling of the kingdoms to his foster brother Kay who unlike Arthur had actually wanted to be chosen High King.) This is one of the deviations from baseline of which I spoke above. But the gags I wrote Wednesday are definitely King Arthur gags and that's what's important. Well, except for one of them, whose punchline rather proceeds from current events; but (coincidentally or not) that one's my least favorite of the lot anyway.

Webcomics I read:
Irregular Comic, AppleGeeks, Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, Loserz, User Friendly, Sluggy Freelance,
Boxjam's Doodle, Real Life, Sinfest, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Kevin & Kell and PvP.
See also The Belfry Comics Index and Comixpedia.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.