So, I basically resolved in my last post to post my New Year’s Resolution promptly. My New Year’s Resolution was to not follow any rabbit holes away from the larger projects I’ve got sitting around waiting for my attentions (ie: Lusus and Dregs). Well. With that line of thought in mind I present to you now Krazy Hamlet:
Please note that while a working knowledge of what-the-hell Krazy Kat is may be a helpful supplement to this piece, a working knowledge of my Hamlet project is pretty much a must.
Anyhow, the basic deal here is that I wrote out a couple of ideas for this Hamlet piece some years back and have been shuttling the scrap of paper from pile to pile in my office ever since. While cleaning up my office a bit in preparation for getting some real work done on Dregs, I decided that I’d had enough of this particular bit of paper and was going to recycle it. The way my mind works meant that I had to produce the comic in order to make the scrap unnecessary. What’s amazing is that even as I type that, I realize the absurdity and yet remain convinced I made the right choice. Whatta world.
From start to finish this project was envisioned as a single sheet at poster size, even though it’s far too esoteric to ever be produced. It had no storyboard or planning beyond my scrawled notes and so was written and paced as I penciled. I knew pretty early that I would be using photoshop to color it and then to try and halftone the colors to mimic the early newspaper printing process. At the end of the day, I realize that the audience for this is smaller even than for my usual work, making it possibly the least worthwhile project I’ve ever done, but it was still a fun tramp down a style that’s not really my own (wags may point out that this is my second Krazy Kat piece, the first being a Waiting for Godot/Superman piece also up on the Hamlet site, which, now that I think of it, may be even more esoteric than Krazy Hamlet…). Whatever. Enjoy.
For those keeping track- this means I’ve already resoneged on both my New Year’s Resolution AND the resolution to promptly post that very resolution to this blog. Tricky.
I shouldn’t have to say it, but their is, of course, some color drift between the originals and the scans. The digital copies, btw, are compiled from 4 separate scans, a crummy process that will continue until I can figure out how to get a hold of a large format scanner of my own. Raise your hand if you need a patron!
