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IHM, VoR, and DvP – The time before SED

Okay, so back before SED, there was another comic that The Colorist (Mitch) and I tried to get started. The name of that comic was I Hate Mondays.

What was it about? Well, it was this kinda mind bending fantasy about a guy named Barry Gibbler who works in an office... And he's so bored with his life that he starts drifting off into his own little fantasies. Like, a simple trip to the copy room with a profit-expenditure report becomes him wandering the forest, dodging ninjas, to find an old sage who can copy a mystic tome.

Eventually, Barry gets a little too wrapped up in his own fantasies, and weird shit starts happening in the office, that was supposed to have only happened in his head. Like he finds shuriken (ninja stars) stuck in the wall outside the copy room or a janitor claims to have been assaulted by ninjas at 2:30 in the morning, while cleaning the copy room.

This all leads to Barry getting stuck in his own head, while an Evil Barry takes over his life, and Barry has to go on an epic adventure through all his old fantasies, etc etc.

It was a solid idea, and it gave me a lot of opportunities to use my widely varying style and short attention span. (Because I could use one style for one week, then switch to another for the next week.) Only problem? It was a bit too complicated to draw on a daily basis. Especially with color. I didn't even get the first page done before I realized the problems with the idea.

Okay, so scrap IHM.

But, the colorist and I really liked some of the characters, and some of the setting, so we started twisting it around another idea: Make a website about video games.

Enter DvP and VoR
Imagine an AltReality experiment. Where there's two websites that seem to be off in their own little world, talking about video games and entertainment, some of which don't really exist. One is the blog of a Game Development company, and the other is an online video game magazine.

The blog is called 'Developer versus Player' (DvP), and the magazine is called 'Voice of Reason' (VoR).

All the people working on the two sites are fake. Some of the thing reviewed are fake. But either way, it's a focus for the ongoing war between gamers and the developers and their financiers.

Basically, the whole idea was combine my art skills, passion for storytelling, and knowledge of the video game industry with Mitch's writing skills, programming, and video game addiction.

It bombed.

There was wayyy too much writing that needed to be done, with too many voices. But in the mean time, we ended up with a bunch of writing. I figure I'll put a bit of it up here just to act as conversation fodder.