Well Mike57 from California, the truth is I haven’t actually made a new comic in years so I’m more than a bit rusty on the details. What you’ve been seeing are “enhanced” versions of the original series plus a hodgepodge of stuff that was created in 2006. Some of the newer stuff was released previously and some wasn’t. However even the unreleased stuff was still written previously so we’ll have to wait a good ten weeks from now to see if I’m still capable of producing mildly amusing disposable humor on a regular basis.

As for the process itself, it’s pretty straightforward. I use a Mac and I tend to write in Scrivener. It’s a simple lightweight creative writing application and it lets me aggregate my “strip scripts” into categories. This helps weed out the really bad ideas from the slightly less rotten ones, though it offers no inherent protection from my need to integrate bad puns into dialogue. Nevertheless, I mention the writing first because this is where I spend most of my time. I’ll sit down and write and write and write until I end up with something that I’m reasonably happy with. At that point the script ends up in my “ideas” category where it sits and brews for a few days or weeks until I either hate it or sort of like it enough to use it.

Regarding the illustrations, most of the comic is hand illustrated in Adobe Illustrator. So the foregrounds & characters are all vector artwork that’s hand drawn and colored with a mouse. For those of you unfamiliar with vector art, think of it as 3d animation without the extra “d” (or the animation). Essentially I create a character like Gill or Steve and then reuse them throughout the strips. I can change expressions, move fins and reposition eyes without recreating the character each time – at least for the most part. I opted for this method verses the Photoshop with a graphics tablet approach since the characters in FishTanked are relatively simple and drawing them over and over just takes too long.

Backgrounds are another ball game. Some are digitally created, some are 3d illustrated and others are digitally enhanced photos. What gets used depends on the mood and the scene. Though these days I lean towards the digitized photos a bit more since they lend contrast to the fish. Plus, again, drawing the backgrounds by hand takes hours. Yes, I’m creatively lazy.

The end result is a PNG file produced by Illustrator and uploaded to the site. Total time from start to finish for each strip varies quite a bit but its not uncommon to spend about 3-4 hours per comic. All that for the potential chance at a chortle, chuckle or guffaw…

Have a question? Ask Joe.