This is the annotated listing of my "normal" Bench strips. Click on a thumbnail to see the strip. (Each strip is less than 80k.)

I made a stylistic decision at the start to try not using speech balloons or arrows, and instead use 2 different fonts and careful placement of the text. Normally I make Gabe speak in Comic font, Squirrel in Baskerville. That is more limiting in what I can do with dialog, but I enjoy the challenge, and I kind of like the distinctive way it made my strips look. It also saved me having to figure out how to make decent speech balloons when I was a Gimp newbie. :)

623 I had just seen the new movie Titus, based on Shakespeare's bloody play Titus Andronicus. Those are twigs and branches stuck in the stumps of the wrists, not stationary blood streams squirting out... I didn't think to make the squirrel's mouth open when he speaks. Other than that, I'm happy with this as a debut strip. I didn't want to just make the usual sort of Matrix reference strips. I tend to enjoy more obscure humor and more esoteric references.

634 This is the surreally romantic finale of Fight Club. I am happy with the explosions in frame 2, but the continued burning in frame 3 is weak. Imagine the Pixies' "Where is my Mind" playing in the background.

643 Titanic Lite. This is probably my worst strip. Someone else did earlier Bench strips with the "Bench Lite" theme, and I had some muddled idea of how Titanic was 3 hours long instead of 2... the punchline is ambiguous and unfunny. Mostly it was an excuse to make Gabe look frozen over like Jack at the end of the movie...

712 Crossover with the Red Meat comic. I love McMoo the anti-drug cow. I also love the phrase "hopped-up on goof balls." My first cut-and-paste from a non-Bench source. Also it became clear to me that I was now hooked and going to make a lot of these things, so I started signing them.

713 A classic scene from The Graduate. My first experiment in blending in a photograph with the drawn characters. (That is Anne Bancroft's leg from the movie poster.)

737 The eighth rule of Fight Club! Boy I love that movie. I like this strip a lot too. I consciously clipped the animal crowd scene from an earlier Bench strip rather than making my own. I enjoy the meta referencing between strips and the sense of deja vu. This time I scaled Gabe up and did the additional art (bruises, blood, torn clothes), then scaled it back down. That came out better than adding art at the final size (cf. twigs in 623 or frozen in 643).

768 Another comic crossover, this time Sparky the Penguin from This Modern World (by Tom Tomorrow, get it?). I did this as a joke about all the previous Bench strips that used the Linux penguin. Also my first experience with colorization (adding the color to black and white Sparky beak & goggles).

797 A classic scene from Casablanca. Making a strip in black and white was fun (and certainly an easy effect). I liked having a good classic reason to make it black and white. I also used a nontrivial background (plasma pattern) for the first time since I wanted it to look gray and smoky like Rick's bar. I also went looking through old Penny Arcade strips to find the angry turning head used in third frame. "Meat for dogs" is an old inside joke phrase among some of my friends.

Around now I noticed that some of the art I was clipping from previous strips had Gabe misplaced, floating a little bit above the bench. Sadly my nice Casablanca strip was marred by this. I decided to get more serious and careful. I began to systematically organize the chaotic jumble of raw material clip art I'd collected, and I more carefully reused art I'd created (like a correctly aligned cartoon frame with my "russ" sig). I found I could download some very hi-res art of Gabe, the squirrel, and the bench, and I started working more carefully with layers and channels and other features in the Gimp. A recently created Grokking the Gimp site proved to be very helpful for learning how to use the Gimp more effectively. Up till now I'd been working with jpgs. Once you save them, all layer info is lost. From here on, I used the Gimp's xcf format, so that I can always go back to the original work and fiddle with its layers. That was also handy for making the thumbnails for this page: some of the thumbnails are modified from the "published" strip.

891 Another Titus reference. Two characters in the movie are hung upside down and their throats cut. Unfortunately, the art here makes the falling blood look too much like a red string or ribbon. Too bad, because I like the strip otherwise. Many typical Bench strips have the squirrel do something awful to Gabe, and the punchline is him saying "I hate you, squirrel." I like reversing that, and using 2 squirrels instead of 1.

909 "New haircut?" The Cthulhu art comes from a Penny Arcade strip, and has been used by a few other Bench artists. There have been many Bench strips that had Gabe changed in some ridiculous way and the squirrel asks "New haircut?" I was surprised no one combined the two before I did... I intentionally used plain white background since this was a retro strip.

911 "The Call of Cthulhu" is a classic H. P. Lovecraft story. Dig that eldritch plasma background.

I was pleased this was one of Tycho's Bench Picks of the Week.

925 Pink eye. Brendan told me one night that his daughter had pink eye so he wouldn't be coming over the next day... and I then whipped out this strip quickly. I think this strip has the most "normal" standard comic strip style punch line I've done so far. Anyone could "get it" without needing much context. This has an arty background, a giant light gray blurry subtle eye. It's primarily just to experiment with getting some variety; if you don't recognize it as an eye, that's fine, it can just be abstract background noise.

Series of Lewis Carroll strips. Around now something clicked, and I got several cool ideas for Lewis Carroll crossover strips!

996 What is it like to be a squirrel? Gabe & the squirrel switch bodies for a moment, and I get to play around more with colorizing. The Alice illustrations are much easier to colorize (black outlines, white interiors). I haven't yet decided how best to colorize already colored art. These came out ok, I think.

1003 "Did you just feel a bump?" A simple sight gag. After doing several of the time-consuming Alice strips, I decided to do a quick fluffy one, and I'd had this gag in mind for a few days.

1006 What is it like to be a bench? Gabe & the bench switch bodies for a moment. More colorizing fun, with a very lowbrow punchline.

1021 The reader has fallen and can't get up! Fun meta sight gag. Any writing that mentions the reader has to worry about using gender-specific pronouns when referring to the unknown reader. I use "they" as the singular third person pronoun here rather than assuming "he", even though in reality I'm sure most Bench readers are male. Artwise, I did a canvas followed by blur on the grass, if memory serves, and I liked the way it came out.

1055 Another Richard Gere gerbiling joke. There have been many Bench strips with the squirrel shoved up Gabe's butt, so I wanted to spoof them and come up with a fresh twist. I'm also putting more effort into the wording of the panels for the punchline humor and not just depending on the visual punchline.

1087 Gabe has a crush on Candy Angel (from Radiskull and Devil Doll). She is indeed a hottie.

This one starts out as yet another version of the Red Meat floating skull "Is it still there?" strip (of which there have been many Bench strips), but I think I took it in a new direction. This strip's first panel is the last panel of the traditional "Is it still there?" strip, then it moves on from there.

(I first met Radiskull and Devil Doll at _Newt_'s Bench strip 283.)

Series of yoga strips. Gabe starts taking yoga classes. (I did too.)

1124 Gabe dreams of Candy Angel. For some reason I really enjoy the imagery of surreally swapped color schemes between characters. (Perhaps I'm just enjoying it as a fun way of getting more experience with digital art manipulation.) Plus, Candy Angel is such a hottie of course.

1292 Radiskull attacks Gabe. Confused? Go watch Radiskull and Devil Doll cartoons!

1333 Gabe philosophizes about free will. Perhaps I had puppetry on the mind from seeing Being John Malkovich a few weeks before.

1336 My pal Brendan is a new dad...

1391 Geekly musings.

1415 Art critics. This one was mildly controversial as I got an email accusing me of ripping off Penny Arcade. This seemed ironic and funny to me since that was part of the point of this strip, that Bench strips make heavy use of "found art"; yet they can still be interesting valid art in their own right, just as the original Penny Arcade strip argued that computer games can be artistic. I intentionally kept the first 2 frames identical, and only neatly changed what was on the pedestal (the monitor recursively shows this very strip) and the dialog in the third frame (while keeping the same look and feel of the original's dialog). I thought this strip was meta and perhaps provocative, but I certainly expected Bench readers to be familiar with the original PA strip, and I make no pretense that I drew the art! So, is this strip brilliant insightful satire or cheap lazy ripoff? You make the call...

Series of Watchmen strips. These are especially cool since they contain lots of my own drawing scanned in. The characters are from Bench/PA; everything else is my own original art.

1477 Our heroes go hear some live goth music. I found a website with scans of medieval death art and got this simple idea.

1517 Roy Batty's death scene from Bladerunner. Didja notice Gabe's 2 broken fingers? Thanks to fubuki's 1270 for sparking the idea of doing a Bladerunner strip. I tried using the motion blur tool to get the look of rain streaking down. Roy's quote shows up on lots of people's web pages; it's unclear if he says "tears in rain" or "tears in the rain"...

1662 One of my favorite Salvador Dali paintings. The original Dali painting has a bumblebee not a squirrel... The tigers reminded me of the Penny Arcade strip 10/13/99 Gabriel: 1977:1999. Mostly I wanted a fun excuse to try blending the painting texture into the cartoon face.

1690 Gabe & Tycho really dislike User Friendly, and after the launch of the UFMedia website, they made the PA strip $50: All Night Tech Support. My bench strip is of course a spoof of that, and an excuse to draw Tycho & Gabe in Illiad's art style. All 5 of the characters are my own drawing, attempting to mimic the UF style. The 3 on the left are UF characters Stef, Greg and Pitr. Dust Puppy is the most popular UF character, a little fuzzy black critter mascot thingie.

Tycho loved this strip, and it was a pick of the week, but it seems the satire was a bit subtle for some people; I got the following email:
"that pa cartoon you did wasn't even funny. and learn how to draw idiot."

1715 Horizontal panel dividers. Doing the obligatory meta playing around with the physical layout thing with this one and the next one...

1727 The downward spiral.

1910 E3. I think this one works fine on its own, but it's even better if you've seen this Penny Arcade strip.

1934 I like this idea of a choose-your-own-path comic that rejoins with a final panel that can work with different paths to it. I got inspired by the 5/12/2000 strip that branches after the first frame (but didn't rejoin) at Game Marks. I've seen more sophisticated meta layout stuff in the past at Scott McCloud's site. Now if only I could come up with one of these with a more sophisticated punchline!

The middle panels are from classic PA strips 1/7/2000 and 5/5/2000.

2058 Remember the scene in Fight Club when he's talking to the woman on the plane?

2058 The Watchmen series is getting quite popular... but I must still honor my Titus Andronicus Bench roots...

2058 Player vs Player 7/21/99 and Penny Arcade 10/6/99... Whoa. Deja vu!

2215 So Brendan & I were having this funny conversation. Not my normal style of Bench strip...

2228 I really liked the whole schlocky 80s music part of the movie American Psycho... Here Gabe and Squirrel reenact the murder of Paul Allen for your viewing pleasure. This scene used Huey Lewis and the News as background music.

Obscure inside joke: Watchmen blood splotch on the pac-man symbol.

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