Hi, i’m Crazy.
Meaning, that’s my handle, not that i’m insane. Handle, as in, online nickname. Why did the word “handle” die, anwyay? Strange.
No matter. The reason this page exists is that once upon a time, long, long ago – specifically sometime in late June or early July of 2009 – i thought i would finally dump my old comic project, The Inevitable Adventures of Grim and Crazy, to start a new one.
I’d always scribbled in my notebooks. Indeed, i scribbled much more than i did anything else. While other people filled 2-3, maybe 4 maths notebooks in a year, i filled perhaps a quarter of one. And even then, a good 3/4 of the thing was just scribbling. And the rest was just pretending to work rather than working. I honestly don’t know why i didn’t fail.
But anyway. I scribbled comics, too. Mostly to amuse myself and those around me. In-jokes about school, about teachers. In time, i realized that what i loved about these comics and why i looked at TIAoGaC as a chore was not the content, but the form.
TIAoGaC was a large page comic, with set characters and a continuity. Yes, it was a gaming webcomic, yes, i know how cliché that is, but i love gaming and it felt natural. But the page was too large for a gag-a-day strip, the characters were real people and much less malleable than imaginary ones, a continuity i just felt as a drag to jokes.
When i drew comics in my notebook, they were a small format, one A4 page wide. I felt controlled by it, but not restricted. It limited me, but it was a limit i could work with, to make my point clear and uncontested, to focus on the punchline. I’m not a trained artist, i’ve never taken a lesson in my life (and it shows) – i’m not very good at drawing faces. So i didn’t bother when i was just scribbling. I should have, to improve my skills, but i didn’t. What happened was that i realized i could do without faces. I could emote without faces, i could characterize without faces, i didn’t need set characters with set designs.
That became the main element in No Happy Endings. No characters. No faces.
I chose not to do a gaming webcomic, there are enough of those for all tastes. I couldn’t possibly stop being a geek and stop doing geek humor, but… making jokes of the tragedy of living… yes, that sounds like fun.
So i grabbed my trusty tablet pen and started drawing NHE #01. It was an admittedly bad joke, i didn’t intend to take this project seriously. I uploaded it on the monkkonen.net forums, my internet home. Ah, home. The smell of pine and the warmth of a fireplace. The comfy recliners and the sheepskins you can dig your toes into.
In time, i seemed to hit a string of jokes that both i and the 5 or so people that frequented the forums really enjoyed, and i felt the need for quality had very suddenly been driven very high. But it still felt enjoyable to make the comics, even though being stumped for a proper joke became common. So i still try.
Sure, there’s people who don’t think the jokes i consider “good” are worth a dime and there’s people that will loudly proclaim so. But really, what did you expect? After all, there are no happy endings.
