Of Noobs and Men has grown a lot over the course of the first hundred comics. Starting out I jumped in without any research, thinking “I can bang out a couple of comic strips, no problem.” I quickly learned just how time consuming a process these things can be. The first comics took close to twelve hours apiece and they looked terrible. Below is one of the earliest strips.
As I struggled to keep up with the once-a-week update schedule I had set for myself I began to get discouraged. I also felt guilty about the missing updates, despite the fact that there was only one or two people reading. Things got worse as 2007 continued, and by the end of the year I was lucky to get two comics out a month. At that point the site was pretty bare bones. Sadly, the very first version of the site is lost to history. Below are several stages in the evolution of the site.
The main characters that we have today, Jim and Guillaume were not the first. My first attempt at a character to star in the strip was this guy on the right in the first panel below.
I gave up on him rather quickly though and the strip was without leads until January of 2008 (though Batman does show up a surprising number of times). The first appearance together of Jim and Guillaume was in this strip below.
Their designs have changed a little over the course of the strip, with Gui going from stubble, to beard,
to clean shaven.
Jim too, has gone through changes. Besides the color of his suit, he’s also gone from having a more bird-like beak,
to having a beak-like nose.
To close out this retrospective I’d like to give you my favorite moments over the past one hundred comics. First up is the strip that introduced oNaM to a wider audience. I had been submitting my comic to the Joystiq Weekly Webcomic Wrapup for months by the time a comic was chosen.
This simple comic about Altair missing a landing was the cause for my traffic to shoot up 18,000 fold. To be placed in the Joystiq WWW, was quite an honor for me and the fact that that comic netted 60 votes greatly buoyed my spirits. One other comic since then has been in the JWWW, though it didn’t garner quite as much attention.
The second of my favorite moments was the first comic done in Photoshop. It allowed me greater freedom than the program I had been using previously, The Gimp. I really stretched my artistic muscles on this one.
Third, is the comic that sparked the greatest amount of debate.
People did not care for my assessment that Diablo 3 was taking too safe a route with its design. What followed was a heated exchange in the comments and on the forums that helped to set the standard for reasoned, logical debate in the oNaM community. Well reseached, thoughtful discussion of games is going on right now in the forums, and I believe the Diablo 3 controversy is partially to credit for it.
My final favorite moment was this past Tuesday, when I reached one hundred comics. Months ago when I told my father that I had done 25 comics, he said that that was quite a body of work. Obviously he was just trying to encourage me, but that comment wasn’t too accurate. Now that I’ve done 100, I feel that this is a good start to a real body of work, that will only continue to improve as the years go on. Thanks for reading.
