How to draw comics the Scary Go Round way
Someone asked about this feature months ago; I was looking for something else just now and found it. These are from September 2005, so nearly 20 years old. They are provided for entertainment purposes only and not as actual advice about anything. I am almost too scared to read them. Not because they're bad, but because they represent a beautiful innocence lost.
Anyway yes, FUN.
I found How To Draw Comics The Scary Go Round Way looking for the guest strips other cartoonists did for (later period) Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery, all of which are currently offline. They're not where they should be, nor on the Internet Wayback Machine, so wish me luck in locating them. And let me know if there are any other archival things you remember and want to see dug up.
Comments (22)
There’s something inherently charming about the way SGR’s cast and setting was designed during the Adobe era Makes me wonder what it would look like with your current skillset (in terms of character range, how the composition is done, etc)
Yeah, remember when Google was good?
Oh my god, I remember reading this first time around! I was 15 and trying (badly) to make webcomics at the time so this was a big help.
A lovely comment to get, Beth!
I've often thought a 0.5mm mechanical pencil would make a handy improvised shiv.
I once dropped one mid-phone call, caught it "hard" you might say, and bled a lot while trying to renew my car insurance.
I love this, particularly the half earnest, half snarky tone. Thank you for sharing 😀
Speaking of obscure archival things, I remember one Bad Machinery extra you once drew for another site which was centred on a Quiche Lorraine recipe. It inspired me to bake the occasional one back in the day, although with store-bought crust because at heart I was, am, and will always remain a coward.
I see looking back on these John, you were always quite smitten with Rogue's late 80s costume.
Has your writing process has changed much over the years from that outlined in the first of these strips? Some of it seems familiar from more recent insights into your process. And are the pens in the final strip still your pens of choice?
My process is a lot more organised now, with more stages, and I work in much bigger chunks now. I might plot several of the "issues' I present here at once. I still tend to max out at writing 5-6 pages in a day, but I'll write all week. I haven't drawn a comic for the main strip with pens since 2007. I wouldn't use a Fountain Pentel today (though I used to buy them by the box) - I'm not really sure what I'd use. My eyesight has deteriorated and I find inking on paper difficult. I used to put my head quite near the paper for details, and I have tendency to still do it (muscle memory I think), but my eyes can't focus. I do still sometimes use those Tombow brush pens to fill in solid black areas. I buy them for general use, great for convention signage. Though they were very cheap in 2005, and they're not any more!
re: "not where they should be" check your Bluesky DMs
I do miss rereading the old Scary Go Round strips during the Illustrator era. I would buy those comics in physical form if I could! I also have one of the tshirts you were selling from around that time period: a brown one that says "It's okay to be you" with robots on it. I can't bring myself to wear it too often for fear that it will eventually wear out and I won't be able to replace it with the exact same shirt. Also, imagine my disappointment when I looked up the Social Anxiety book by Gillian Butler only to find it does not actually mention werewolves.
There are PDFs of all the Scary Go Round volumes on my Gumroad page (scarygoround.gumroad.com), they're £3 or £3.50 each. I've never been able to justify the expense of reprinting/warehousing the collections but the PDF versions have been a very welcome source of income.
I don't remember the How to Draw… series, but I do fondly remember the story being written in it. Good times, good times, back in aught-5.
Did some Internet archive digging myself a few months ago, and I was able to find a large amount of the SGR guest strips. I think an easy way to locate the ones made for filling up the strip itself would be going to a later version of the archive with a smaller chance of running into broken pages, like the link I’ll provide below. https://web.archive.org/web/20200221165637/http://www.scarygoround.com/sgr/ There are still a number of runner-ups for both the Scary Idol (2006) and Feats of Strength (2008) contests that I haven’t found a way of accessing, though. Either way, I’d be willing to send what I could find along if it helps, though they’d be in the low resolutions they had back in the day.
I've got all the Feats of Strength comics. It's the October 2008 Scary Go Round guest strips (including Rene Engstrom's), and the one set of Bad Machinery guest strips, that I don't have. i can't remember what the date of the Bad Machinery ones was. The folder I kept them in has vanished from my backup.
When you published this, I was teaching at the Art Institute of Colorado. I think I wrote an email to you asking if I can share them in a class on the topic. I think you replied? The email is certainly lost on my end, like tears in the rain.
I used to be snowed under with reader email, so it's possible I did not respond, or responded months later!
"Keep a notepad nearby to write your crummy ideas in - after all, a cake is almost totally composed of crumbs!" - honestly a legitimately inspiring idiom, good work past John.
Good luck finding those old sites! I treasure those old strips so.
I remember this! Wow, has it been that long? "After all, you're not a robot." We all will be soon, John. Very soon.