There, now I got it off my chest. And it's true, too. Way back in Junior High School (which was longer ago than I care to mention) I started drawing a comic strip and I wrote down a bunch of possible names for it, then I went around and asked everyone I knew (and a few people that I didn't) what the best one was. Watch this Space won over Serendipity by one vote. Most of the strips had to do with high-schooly things - cute guys, popular girls, teen angst, being ignored by my parents, like that. I kept drawing it up through college at a slow but steady pace - I still don't know where all the old ones are that I've done over the years, but there was quite a pile of them at one point.

Back in the day, though, the only thing that you could do with your little doodly cartoons were if you got REALLY good and REALLY original or dumbed your content down to whatever would appeal to the masses, you could re-draw them on 12"x9" posterboard in INK (EWW! INK! THE HORROR!!) and send it to a syndicate who might possibly sniff at it before throwing it in the trash rather than take it on for re-sale to the newspapers. Not only could I not draw in ink at ALL, I didn't have the drive to do up fancy posterboards and much as I loved my little cartoons, I knew they weren't exactly newspaper-sellers. Despite that, though, I still hoped to be a professional cartoonist someday. Somehow...(cue swell of dramatic music...)

Then this fancified "Internet" business came around. I soon made my first page way back in '96, and one of the first things I put up were a few badly-scanned comics. Scanners weren't what they are now, and neither were image editing programs, and neither were my not-very-l33t skillz with either one, and so after putting up the few that I had they just kind of lounged there, doing nothing. I got a full-time job and got married and had a baby, and although I'd once planned to be a professional cartoonist it kind of fell by the wayside.

And then about a year or two ago, I started hearing about a web-comic called "User Friendly." It was popular with my tech-support friends at the company I worked for. I had a moment of envy, but still didn't have the time, materials or skills to keep going with my strip. Then I heard about a comic called Penny Arcade, and then a small group of my internet friends started talking about all the different webcomics they looked at all the time, and then that group got bigger, and then some of them started making strips through generic "strip creators," and then one of them started a real strip that started getting attention...and another one...and another one...

Which brings us up to present day. After playing with my parents' scanner and trying out the Photoshop tricks that I've built over the years I realized that I've finally gotten to the point technology-wise that I can actually produce something close to what I want with not that much effort. So first I'm going to clean up some of my old strips and put them up, and then when I get a scanner next month I'm going to start producing new ones. So yes, I'm jumping on the webcomic badwagon...but it's MY bandwagon, dammit! MINE! I WAS FIRST!! FIIIIRRRRSSSTT!!

At this point Sarah broke down into incoherent sobbing. Ummm...go ahead and read the strip or something, there's nothing to see here...