Surmount RELEASE DATE! And The Magic of The Extra Page
Hallå my pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
The big news I teased about last week: Surmount is coming out on the 9th of May, on both PC and Nintendo Switch! We’ve got this brand new trailer to go with the announcement, it was edited by Nick Verge and voiced by Monica L at Popagenda. It feels so polished and professional! I love to see how much progress we made overall since the very first trailer.
On to today’s writing! It’s even more comic-talk.
The magic of The Extra Page
There’s always a page full of funny stuff in serious newspapers. I always found that inspiring.
To me the highlight of that page was always the comic strips. You never know what horrible news will be in the paper today, wars and murders, etc. But those strips are sure to be there throughout all of that. It’s such a simple, humble example of what art is for.
What struck me as a kid was that somewhere out there in the world, are people who’s jobs are to help make sure that that page is always filled with stuff.
What does it take to make that?
Do you have any idea how many Peanuts strips there are? Charles Schulz drew over 17 897 Peanuts strips, which took him 50 years.
At the height of his career, Charles Schulz could draw some Peanuts strips in just 15 minutes.
And Calvin & Hobbes? “Only” 3160 strips. Which took Bill Watterson 10 years of daily publishing. He described how challenging this art is in a commencement speech from 1990.
My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year. If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood.
It doesn’t take a lot of equipment or time to make 1 strip. But you better become an athletic thinker. He continues,
I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
In order to keep going, the cartoonist needs to see their strip as a sort of mental playground.
What makes a good strip?
It’s not every day that you actually laugh or feel a lot about what you read in a strip. Our faces mostly remain neutral after reading them. By the nature of the medium, the characters always end up leading some sort of daily life. Which means not every moment of their existence can be perfectly written, just like our lives aren’t. That mundanity makes them relatable and breaths more life into their worlds.
We generally think that comic strips are permanent, unchanging, status-quo worlds. Which isn’t true, they all change throughout time. It just doesn’t happen with the same logic as other fictional worlds. The characters of a strip are symbols or little piano notes, and the way the cartoonist play with them changes as they age.
The most obvious example is when new characters were introduced in Peanuts, they often started out as babies (this is the first appearance of Schroeder, the boy who’s always playing the piano). They would age until a certain point and suddenly settle when Schulz found the appropriate age where they best represented an idea.
Comic strips change slowly right in front of our eyes, you probably won’t notice it day to day, but suddenly you might spot a gray hair or look back a couple of years and notice the difference that’s taken place.
For the reader, it’s as if they have an ant farm to check in on every day. By giving attention to the characters in the strip, they feed the characters, which helps them stay alive and healthy. Which also helps make it feel like you’re following something in real time. Like a boxing match.
The problem today…
Newspapers editors only accepted great comics. And back then there weren’t a lot of other options for readers, so they just had to take what they got. That’s not the case now.
There are millions of comics out there waiting and hoping to be read.
Which means we all have to do the job of the editor and go through all the submissions ourselves. I’m picky, so something always puts me off - the writing, the tone, the art style.
Most of the time we don’t care to be an editor though, we just let the social media feed do it for us. For most people the void of comic strips has been filled by memes. Which I think is a bit of a shame, cause memes are used up ones and tossed away, their authors are usually anonymous. They are usually not something anyone can be proud of, or get attached to. It’s almost as if memes are the comic strips of the human race, most of the time nobody gets credit for them. It’s just the human race as a whole that is funny. I don’t know if any single cartoonist can measure up against the combined wit of every person on the planet. And combine that with the boost that the algorithm gives to “random stuff.” There’s no wonder that we don’t bother looking for comic strips.
Despite the social media feed, I still feel a void where the comic strips used to be on the funny page. It felt special to find them there, tucked away in the same spot. Nothing feels that special now.
There are special ones out there…
One online comic strip that has stood out to me particularly is Blind Alley. It’s not trying to be funny. It’s just trying to be real and you can tell that the cartoonist is having a good time exploring these ideas and characters. It feels like a real world that I’m discovering alongside the author. It’s both real and refreshingly surreal in subtle ways.
Here are a couple of other good ones: Hey Hey Momo, Helena, Nedroid.
If you know of any others, please let me know!
Making my own Funny Page…
Sometimes I wonder what Charles Schulz would have done if he would’ve had the same tools as we have today. I like to think I would have had a similar career to him (not as successful though), if had I been born earlier. But times have changed so different thinking it required.
I have a weekly newsletter, I would love to always have a comic strip be part of it. In the best of worlds I would like my newsletter to feel like it’s The Funny Page Deluxe™️. It’s unlikely for people to discover my strip through a small newsletter though. The strip has to be its own thing.
What I want to do is sort of a mix of a classic comic strip and something more manga-inspired. Both visually, but also the way that it’s published.
In Japan they have a weekly magazine where they collect the latest chapters of a bunch of different manga. I love that you get a taste of a bunch of different comics at once, but what I’m latching onto about it are the “funny pages” between every chapter - either the creator answers questions, or there are facts about the characters, or sketches. My brain shoots off in all kinds of directions just thinking about that. I want to incorporate that into my own webcomic! I want people to read the strip and be delightfully surprised by all the extra stuff that comes with it. I would have Q&A sections, show sketches, maybe explain something about the world I’m creating, or show some behind the scenes stuff. All decorated with nice graphic design and fun drawings ofc.
Akira Toriyama made an entire manga volume about how to make comics. To me that feels like funny-pages x3000. He explains how it all went down for him and how he goes about doing things. Reading it is like being invited into an intimate and secret space, where I just get to hang out with him for a while.
I think that’s a clear sign that someone has put their whole heart into something. There’s a bunch of extra, unnecessary stuff that the author really needed to share. In Shonen Jump maybe that stuff is there as cheap and easy padding, but to me it seems like a pleasure to add all that. I want to treat my comic strip and all the things that come with it as if it’s my little garden that I need to tend to, to make a nice place where people will want to stay in for a couple of minutes per week while they have a sip of coffee.
❓ Question time
If you know of any other comic strips that can be read online, please let me know!
Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! The best way to support me right now is by sharing this newsletter with a friend.
Take care and have a creative week.
The internet really does enable a lot of content. Editors being social media feeds...
I wish there were a magazine abour encouraging and building mastery in creativity and art. It's exhausting pruning the internet for things that don't encourage consumerism!
Wow, the release date is just around the corner -- and for Switch as well! It looks great :) Very lively trailer.
I really liked reading your thoughts on the newspaper strip. 17,897 is a crazy number. No wonder Peanuts is such a deep part of American culture; these characters have been doing their thing in the daily paper, decade by decade.
Schulz and you are similar enough to the point where I can see how he may inspire you. Like him, you are always moving forward with your creative productions and your style also often has a "real but cuddly" air to it.
And the whole thing about extra material is also something I've thought about. Think about a YouTube channel with a regular schedule of videos, which suddenly decides to post a silly or informal extra video that isn't part of the regular schedule. Even though the other videos take much more time and effort to put together, that one video is likely going to feel very significant to the loyal subscribers. The video was made with zero obligations and nothing but love. Subconsciously, it actually speaks very deeply to the intentions of that creator. Besides the general fun of it I think it can help establish some sense of trust with the audience -- a little like a cat exposing its belly, hehe.
That may just be me overthinking it of course.