And so that concludes “Robot Jesus R.I.P.,” months and months after it should have ended. To the three of you still reading (Mom, Chris, Zane): thank you.

And that also concludes the first year of The Adventures of Lil’ Gardner & Robot Jesus. It hardly seems like a year has passed, but passed it has, and the time feels right to pull the plug. We’ve had some fun, but all good things must eventually end, and I imagine the same sentiment applies to poorly-drawn webcomics. Thank you, dear readers, for your time and attention.

But wait! Hold back those tears! When God closes a door, he opens a window, and so I’m proud to announce the launch of Lil’ Gardner & Robot Jesus, premiering this Thursday! That’s right! Everything changes! Everything stays the same! ALL-NEW! ALL-DIFFERENT! BE THERE!

So uh, yeah, seriously, I’m changing up the format a little bit. I’m losing “The Adventures of…” for starters, but the big difference is that from now on, LG&RJ will be hand-drawn. The cut-and-paste “aesthetic” of the comic to this point was born of necessity: I didn’t have a scanner, and I’m not a great (or even good) artist to begin with. The simple figures worked well enough when the comic was just Lil’ Gardner and Robot Jesus talking to each other, but I’ve come to realize that the stiff, minimalist style is no longer adequate for the things I want to do with the comic. Over the last year I’ve tried to rationalize the look of the comic to myself in various ways that are too boring to share, but basically the comic looks the way it does because I’m deeply lazy–one of the reasons “Robot Jesus R.I.P.” took so long was that I kept putting off certain scenes because I didn’t want to draw the new stuff that was required–and that’s pretty lame.  So we’re going to try something new. And since I only have three readers, there’s nothing to lose by shaking things up a bit.

As I said, I’m not a good artist, so I’m not saying the comic will be better. But it will be different. The differences art-wise will be immediately apparent. The writing will be more or less the same, though after “R.I.P.” I’m steering well clear of long, meandering storylines. I have plans for a multi-part story in the near future, but it will be comparatively short, and until then it’ll just be short funny comics that don’t require you to remember six months of continuity. Also, though the time-traveling Gardners are still around, I’m going to refocus the strip on Lil’ Gardner and Robot Jesus (you’ll also notice I cleverly killed off the two characters who are hardest to draw). So that’s enough talk–come back on Thursday for the first installment of the new-look Lil’ Gardner & Robot Jesus. Until then, here’s a taste:

Stumble it!

Tags: Robot Jesus R.I.P.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.