One thing I do really like about this format is that I can write a strip and just keep changing it until the last minute. The Health And Danger executive was never originally in this one, and honestly I don’t think it would have been funny without him (any debate as to whether it’s funny with him there notwithstanding).
As you may have gathered, I’m still experimenting with how best to produce these strips. I’ve got the production time down pretty low now.
Here, for the benefit of anyone who had already seen the last batch of Henchmen comics (which I’d posted here in January) are two new strips. Luckily I have found a much faster way to produce them which gives almost exactly the same result, so with any luck I might actually draw some of the other scripts I have stored on my Google Notebook soon.
Here are some comics I did for a new project called Henchmen. It follows the lives of the employees of Doctor Malevolex, a supervillain bent on world domination. It’s an area of the classic film genre that’s always intruiged me; how do you hire people to be henchmen? How do you keep them onside when your mission statement includes the word “overthrow”? How do you run an organisation with all the little faults and clichéd mistakes that all supervillains have? It is, with any luck, somewhere between Dilbert and Evil Inc., (although I don’t like Evil Inc. very much so hopefully it won’t be much like that). VillainSupply.com had a good take on the same kind of idea, but they seem to be defunct. (Presumably someone found the large, obvious self destruct button.)
To be honest, I’m not massively satisfied with the first three, but there are a couple coming up that I’m rather looking forward to drawing, and I do think the first three are necessary to explain the setting, which I think should be done in the comics themselves regardless of whether I’ve explained it here or not. It’s the principle of the thing.
