I oftentimes find myself on the fringe of things, looking in like a participating bystander. Like a reporter, in a lot of ways — not in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson, except not as awesome as him and definitely not as drug-addled. But in high school I wasn’t exceptionally invested in any one thing, with the exception of theatre, I guess, but that was more like I belonged there than I was trying to get in. I couldn’t not be in theatre. If I wasn’t acting in high school I probably would’ve been the most depressed kid in the world. But I digress.

Six years ago I created a comic called Super Luigi World, by compiling a bunch of “sprite sheets” (which are essentially pictures of every single movement a character could perform in a Nintendo game) and then cutting and pasting certain poses into MS Paint, which became frames, which became comics. I have this really excellent bad habit of doing creative things when I have nothing else to do. It’s good because if I’m bored, I’ll do something creative (which is not to be confused with depressed or down … if I’m depressed I’ll do nothing). The bad part is that it takes up so much of my time that I tend not to do what needs to be done, e.g. looking for work, doing housework or schoolwork … generally any type of work.

I worked on SLW off and on for three years, got one chapter done and was working on the second when I just lost track of it and ended up stopping mid-chapter, which is what I tend to do with my writing most of the time. I also made a couple of other sprite comics, which fared better because they were only a few pages long. Well, recently I had a conversation with my friend Casey at /orate, who draws amazing comics using just MSPaint, and that conversation turned into making comics, and long story short, I challenged him to start drawing comics if I started making sprite comics again. He agreed, and so the new SLW comic goes up on October 4th. You can see the teaser comic up on the site now.

So, once again — bored, have nothing to do, so I do something creative. I’ve been writing and recording 50/90 songs since July, which has kept me preoccupied, but I’ve recently finished and really don’t want to touch my guitar for a while, so I gotta do something. And sprite comics + NaNoWriMo in November seem like enough to do.

On a side note, though, there this website called CaptainN.net, which is one of the bigger and better sprite comic sites out there, and I joined their forums in 2003 to promote SLW. Well I came back after a two year absence to promote SLW again, and read on the front page that Webster, the guy who created the website and did a lot of the sprite ripping himself, died of a diabetic coma last February, which totally sucks. I didn’t even know him that well, but he was a good writer and a competent man and it’s sad that he died. This is why I wrote about being on the fringe of things … I was on the fringe of that forum, and I’m usually on the fringe of a lot of internet phenomena, unlike those people who spend hours upon hours on WoW or 4chan.

In closing, I would just like to say that I am a huge nerd. And I’m okay with that. SLW is funny, go read it and enjoy!