schmackLab

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO DRAW.

Up is easy!  You don’t have to be a great artist to get involved with Up.  You can paste pictures together, write a story, find an animated gif, post a youtube video, anything at all that progresses the story in some way.  This PDF that I have been linking to is a remnant of my very rigid process that I employ to create much more polished and far less interesting comics.  Forget it! You don’t need it.

So the big green swamp monster thing just vomited the world.  Think of all the story options you have:

1. The villagers are running away and a little boy in the mix forgot his pet gerbil and must go back in to the lava to save it.
2. The Scandinavian vikings sail over the waterfall and into a magical watery kingdom fraught with danger and love and narwhals!
3. The helicopter crashed into one of the swamp monsters teeth and he must go the dentist.
4. The swamp monster goes to the doctor for a tummy ache and has to deal with a terrible insurance policy.
5. The dragon is scared of the lava and visits a psychiatrist to deal the contradictions in his life.
6. The old woman in front of the house is actually a werewolf and eats everyone she can find.
7. There’s a whole city in the swamp monsters mouth, cities are alive!
8. Forget everything you see in the page and dig deep down to the molecular lever and find stories in the interactions between the molecules.
9. Atoms behave like planets in the solar system maybe they are all solar systems themselves and we are just walking talking universes with infinite stories inside our bones.
10. Suppose the ones of the swap monster are actually the hallow homes of a tribe of nomadic goat herders that must find a way to cross the great pelvic chasm to reach the western femur.
11. The children of the above nomadic tribe ride on the blood cells created in the marrow through the arteries of the swamp monster in a youthful search to satisfy their craving for adrenaline.

Don’t be freaked out because you don’t have the skills to draw a comic page.  I started this because after years of trying to perfect my craft and find the perfect brush stroke I still find that random scribbled comics made in a few moments on a napkin at a bar are way more interesting than what I’m doing.

The internet offers creative outlets that the printed page can never afford.  In print you are restricted by color and size and page number and print runs and publishers.  With the internet you can use any media you like!  Video, audio, text, sculpture, infinitely looping gifs, crazy tall pages, pages that reveal themselves as the reader scrolls, flash interactive pages!

Forget mistakes.  Follow your gut.  Submit. Go to page 1