Sideville Comic

April 26, 2004

sidevillecomic.jpgI’ve decided to let the cat out of the bag and make a pre­lim­i­nary announce­ment for Sidev­ille, my web­comic in the works. The rea­son for this early announce­ment is mainly to modi­vate me to the extent that I will actively pur­sue this project with­out drop­ping it by the wayside.

Sidev­ille will be based on an inde­pen­dent stop-motion ani­mated film of the same name that I was co-creator of. The basic premise of the story is as follows:

> A 12-year old boy named Trevor runs away from home and on his jour­ney hap­pens upon an unkempt pirate vil­lage called Sidev­ille. He learns the inhab­i­tants of the vil­lage are retired cir­cus performers/pirates who have gath­ered together in an effort to hide from the soci­ety that shunned them, thus form­ing the com­mu­nity of Sideville.

sideville-concept1.jpgThe comic is as men­tioned still in the pre­lim­i­nary stages, but I expect to update the Sidev­ille site with con­cept sketches and fur­ther details on the char­ac­ters and story development.

As I flesh out the char­ac­ters I will be post­ing their respec­tive con­cept sketches and other infor­ma­tion per­tain­ing to the comic. I’m hop­ing this will pave the way for the offi­cial unveil­ing of the comic sooner than later.

For now I need to work out the design of the Sidev­ille web­site which will be built with Mov­able Type in order to main­tain the data­base of comics. I’ve nar­rowed down the webisodes to a total of 3 per week (updated every Tues­day, Thurs­day and Sun­day). Since this isn’t a punch­line comic nor does it fol­low the con­ven­tional lay­out for­mat of 3–5 boxes (i.e. Mel­on­pool) it will free me from try­ing to com­pact the sto­ry­line in order to meet the deadline.

Regard­less, as I’ve noticed, many (or should I say all) web comics evolve since their ini­tial debut. It’s amaz­ing to see the evo­lu­tion of the draw­ing style, sto­ry­line and over­all qual­ity of a web comic over time. I’ve taken this into account because in the past I just wasn’t sat­is­fied with the out­put and gave up. Now I real­ize that web comics only get bet­ter and not worse.

As always, stay tuned. 

6 comments

Sounds spiffy! Is the movie avail­able online any­where? I’d love to see it! Will the comic be a con­tin­u­a­tion of the movie, a retelling, or just an inde­pen­dant story?

by Scott on April 26, 2004 at 8:36 pm. Reply #

Scott, thanks for the comments.

There used to be a teaser slash test film, but some­where inbe­tween server moves I lost the footage (which was encoded in the Realplayer format).

Since then I have been search­ing for it, hop­ing it will turn up some­where. At this point my friend (who I co-created the film with) might have the test footage on hand but even that chance is slim.

If I hap­pen upon it again (cross­ing fin­gers) I will be sure to post it again.

Also, the rea­son I’ve decided to re-imagine the story as a comic is that stop-motion ani­ma­tion is both time-consuming and not very cost effec­tive. At one point we were con­sid­er­ing pup­pets and then CG ani­ma­tion but it all boiled down to time and we just didn’t have enough of it sadly.

Mak­ing Sidev­ille a comic will free up my own cre­ative restraints and allow the story to develop and flour­ish as orig­i­nally intended.

by kartooner on April 26, 2004 at 8:44 pm. Reply #

Wow man. This I gotta see. I wish I had time to do some­thing along these lines. Best of luck!

by beto on April 26, 2004 at 9:43 pm. Reply #

I look for­ward to see­ing more on it :)

by linda on April 30, 2004 at 11:15 pm. Reply #

I used to draw a web­comic and let me say that they are a lot of work. The reward­ing fac­tor how­ever is know­ing that peo­ple are read­ing the comic. Make sure you put up a forum for peo­ple to share thoughts on the storyline.

You’ll find that this is a valu­able resource.

by john on May 3, 2004 at 3:54 pm. Reply #

Thanks every­one for the com­ments. The comic is in pre-production for the moment as I research and sketch out ideas.

I’ve com­pleted my port­fo­lio sec­tion for any­one that is inter­ested. For the moment it includes illus­tra­tions and sketches and will even­tu­ally show­case some of my print work and var­i­ous other goodies.

I’m just try­ing to work out the copy­right issues since peo­ple are prone to steal­ing no mat­ter what. I could use an .htac­cess file for deep-linking and pro­tect­ing my images but I some­times post images on other sites.

If any­one has any ideas? My method of pro­tect­ing them now is water­mark­ing them, but even that isn’t 100% effective.

by kartooner on May 4, 2004 at 2:48 pm. Reply #

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