I’m debating starting this up again. I haven’t gotten any readers through Deviant Art like I was semi-hoping (although I still need to upload several more comics), but I have gotten on a bit of an art kick. More recently I’ve been thinking about trying to refine my style into something more unique. Unfortunately that’s not something that can be done willy nilly and requires lots of practice. If I have to draw a bunch of people in different poses, I might as well just draw this comic some more.
If I do restart it, there will be some changes. I think I’ll focus less on humor, letting it come naturally instead of trying to force a joke every comic. I’ll also probably switch to color since I’ve been practicing that more lately and am more confident doing so.
Anyhoo, just a heads up for anyone that may stumble across this and be sad that there’s only ~25 comics.
Ironically, making that poll to better my comic was its undoing. When I got two votes for that poll (one from myself to check if I could vote and another from my brother after asking him to do it), and not a single one was from the 25+ WordPress “followers”, it really drilled the point home that my comic isn’t worth reading. I had suspected, but I didn’t want to accept it until then. So I give up!
I may one day come back to it, but I don’t have it in me to continue this comic JUST for my own sake anymore.
The storyline that would begin with the next comic involved a new enemy called Post’Em who was made up of a bunch of “Post’Em Notes” (because Post-It and surprisingly enough Sticky Note are both trademarked). Essentially the Clayface or Sandman of The Stapler universe. He was gonna kidnap scientists and force them to clone him a new normal body. If you stumble across this site and think that’s interesting, feel free to let me know and maybe I’ll get back to it. Just for kicks, I’m going to start slowly posting these comics once a week to Deviant Art and see if I can expand my audience there.
I’ve enjoyed having someone else do the base artwork for this comic for a while now. But I realized I’m doing so much by myself, I’m really only a couple steps from doing the whole thing myself. So I tried to do so this week. For the first time since “004: Introduction (Part 4)”, this was done start to finish solely by myself.
I also decided to try a couple new things. First off, I slightly modified my normal palette to better fit the night time outdoors location of this comic. Second, I sacrificed a little horizontal area in each panel so I could have the panels separated. I don’t know if I’ll stick with the first change, but the second one will probably be permanent.
I felt like the staple gun was a little underwhelming and uninteresting to look at so I added a few more details to it. Good enough!
I’m still not 100% sure what audience I’m going for here. I try not to use curse words, but when it came to talking about someone dying… I wasn’t sure if I should. Obviously the only real course of action is to not only go for it, but make The Stapler look rather heartless in the process!
My filler plan involves showing the first piece of Stapler artwork I ever made… just about 10 years ago! It all came from me playing with a real life stapler, opening the hinge so I could swing it around, and thinking I’d jokingly draw a hero that used that as a weapon. It all grew from there.
I thought that first piece of artwork showed The Stapler using a weapon similar to “Comic 022: Weapon Get (Part 5)”, but I seem to have confused my memories and now I see that he’s not wielding any such weapon. Weird! Oh well, enjoy!
Other than the general idea of the thrusters that go around his ankles, he’s pretty different looking. And those thrusters haven’t even really been used in the comic!
As you can see, the accent in his last name used to be over the E so it would be pronounced “Stay-play”, but I thought that sounded dumb and moved the accent to the A. Now it’s pronounced “Stah-pull”.
Just a heads up to the handful of subscribers out there: There won’t be a comic on Monday since the artist has a real life event going on. I have an idea for a simple filler piece that’s actually semi-related to what’s currently happening in-comic that I might throw up, but no promises.
Sorry in advance!
The Stupendous Stapler 