In early March I got sucked into the time sink known as The Bench. The Bench is a "community comic strip" or "open source comic" (i.e. anyone can submit strips) that's a fun excuse for messing with silly computer art. The basic idea is there's a guy (Gabe from Penny Arcade) and a squirrel on a bench; do whatever you want with that. The Bench strips vary widely in quality, and often contain obscure references or meta humor referring back to earlier strips. I enjoy it a lot. The Bench really got me motivated to learn the Gimp.

My earliest Bench strips were created very ad hoc. I liked the idea of the community comic strip. It looked like fun, so I thought I'd make a strip or two. Little did I realize the time consuming obsession it would become! I've been having great fun learning lots about making art on the computer. I had virtually no experience using the Gimp art tool, so initially I was doing a lot of things very primitively and labor-intensively. I was also working in the final size rather than larger size and then shrinking down. (This was partly because I was simply clipping components from earlier strips, since I'd not yet discovered the "kit" of hi-res Gabe, squirrel, and bench art. I think the Painter or Flash files were readable by Gimp, I forget which now, having long ago converted them to gimp's xcf format!)

These days, Tycho updates the Bench every Saturday night. So if you submit a strip, don't expect to see it go up until late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.

Here are links to view my Bench strips.

List of all my bench strips.

Annotated thumbnail gallery of my "normal" Bench strips.

The Lewis Carroll series.
The yoga series.
The Watchmen series.

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