Back in Post 16, while I was waiting to get put into a work placement with the local "Dobbies" in late 2017 (sadly, it has nothing to do with the Harry Potter character of the same name), I was invited to help out with this newsletter some of the other students were starting up at the time. I suggested that I could do a comic strip like the ones you'd often find in newspapers such as the Daily Mirror that probably only exist so that parents can show their child something in there that isn't all doom and gloom:
Of course, by this time I'd already created The Night Pig, Hugo and Hex Moother, so I pretty much had the entire main cast of this comic ready to roll. It started off fairly simple, with just a few panels and a black and white colour palette, but as I went along, I ended up adding more and more panels with each strip and even a splash of colour as the story (which I only had a base line plan for in my head) would progress. The narrative I came up with in my head (at least if I remember it correctly) was that Super Sheep and friends were off to defeat Hex Moother as usual until their original inspirations came along to kidnap the entire cast (which ended up also including a character I made for the comic named "Monkeno", an insane monkey who escaped the zoo and is now working with Hex Moother) in order to take them to an interdimensional courthouse run by a big green frog named "Judge Ribbiton" so that said said characters could sue the Super Sheep cast on the grounds of flagrant plagiarism.
I only managed to get as far as revealing where the courthouse is and establishing the lawyer that would help the prosecutors (those being that blue sheep toy which I named "Bluey", The cow from the Harvest Moon series and "Sam The Huggler" from Anchor Butter), in which case I stole the character of Phoenix Wright from the Ace Attorney series, and the one that would help the defendants (those being Super Sheep and all his friends and enemies), where I decided to bring in another character I made called Polygon The Robot (who in the comic has no experience with being a lawyer), but afterwards the Super Sheep characters would have lost the case and got thrown into Sesame Street, but due to a combination of the sporadic release of the newsletters and me going off to work placement in early 2018, the strips only got as far as the third or forth one before I ended up getting replaced by someone else which I didn't find out until I picked one of the later newsletters expecting to find Super Sheep at the end only to find something else entirely (I still made more of them regardless though, which is how I got so far into the narrative until I stopped near the end of that school year because by then, the newsletter had been cancelled)
Now that I've told you the narrative, it's time I showed you all the comics I've still got in my possession, because the first one ended up going missing before I collected them at the end of the school year (that's right, Super Sheep barely exists and he's already got a piece of lost media under his belt):
Part of the reason I got replaced in the first place was because this invitation was only a temporary position until I got my work placement at Dobbies which I ended up leaving after a combination of working just a bit too slowly one time and not really enjoying it all that much, as all I did there was remove any dead leaves from the plants and other general cleaning with a hint of customer service thrown in there for good measure. Luckily I was later able to do my work placement at the Southport Foodbank instead. (which I found to be a lot more enjoyable) But enough about my work placement, this is meant to be about the comics.
Overall I quite enjoyed making these comics, as it allowed me to use my creative juices to come up with a ridiculous storyline where all the characters get sued (and from there they would have ended up in Sesame Street where they try and escape before it drives theme all insane) as well as drawing all the characters with some of the funniest expressions I could think of at that time, some of which I actually think I should try and do more often, like this one:
What I also like about this comic in a retrospective sense is that it can serve as a lookback into earlier versions of some of the characters and places, particularly Hex Moother and his Lair, which looked quite different to how they do today:
Another thing I like is that I made it so that the characters could occasionally break the comic box's boundaries because of how it added a layer of surrealism to the series because if you're making a comic about a blue cartoon sheep, realism (which by the way, is not the same thing as believability) can simply be thrown out the window entirely, especially if it's being done for the sake of laughter. (although given how I never saw anyone actually reading these comics I can probably assume that they didn't leave much of an impact anyway)
Of course, the artwork wasn't always as good as I think it could have been (although it did marginally improve as the series went on) due to a lack of consistency in certain areas such as Super Sheep's ears (as well as things such as his cape and even his eyes) constantly being different sizes even though he's supposed to be the exact same distance away from the camera (which is still something I'm attempting to work on to this day):
Another thing that I just noticed while doing this post is the fact that when "bluey" is wearing his cloak, his arms are implied to actually be coming from his head, even though when he takes it off, they're nowhere near his head:
but apart from those glaring inconsistencies (as well as the art not being very good for the standards of a hand drawn comic), I'm glad these comics exist, because now I can learn from what didn't work and thus, the next comic I decide to do is likely to be better than this, at least on the artistic front. (at the very least it's better than a bunch of my other "work" from the time before I went to college which you can find out about on my other website from creative media level 2)
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