The Ideas Degeneration Process

This was a conversation I had with a friend of mine named Ben a little while ago.

Ben writes and draws Sliced Apples, which is a webcomic I highly recommend you check out. At the time of writing it’s just hit its 300th page, so there is a fair amount of awesome comicy goodness to see (admittedly I’m still catching up, as travelling has slowed my comic reading quite substantially, but it’s well worth what time I can find!) and, unlike a certain webcomic you’re on at this very moment, it updates regularly and reliably. You can start reading from the beginning right here.
So add that to your bookmarks/RSS reader/whatever it is you crazy kids use to keep up with yer comics these days!

The conversation by the way was about how the comic gets written, and Cam’s part in that process specifically. For the strips that are actually written — that is to say, the ones not based pretty much verbatim on actual events — this is pretty much how it goes.

Don’t get me wrong, when Cam writes a good comic it usually ends up becoming one of my favourites, and I can generally use it word for word.
Some, however… well, they would take a bit of tweaking to be usable. That isn’t to say the Maybe Pile is actually a one-way gate to oblivion; the majority of those unused ideas are rife with the mirths, but just wouldn’t be suited to turn into an As You’re Up strip, at least in its rawest form.

Oh yeah, and by the time this goes live I should be back from the States. So, boo to that.