Behind the Scenes

Attention GPF Premium Subscribers! A much larger, more in-depth version of this "Behind the Scenes" page is now available to you! This exclusive tour takes you step by step through the entire process of making GPF, including detailed pictures and screenshots, as well as a few of my digital image editing techniques. But this expanded tour is only available to subscribers of GPF Premium, so sign up today if you haven't already! Click the GPF Premium link above for more details.

I'll admit it; this page doesn't get updated nearly as often as it should. Of course, my process for making the strip has only changed slightly since I first started way back in 1998, and then usually only in the form of optimizations to speed up the process. But I've taken out this ol' page, hung it on the line and beat the dust off it with a broom. I figure I average updating it once every two or three years, so it was about due....

So you're looking to learn a thing or two that goes on around here, aren't you? Well, here's the place to start. :) GPF was around at least a year before its official debut, like many of my projects taking a period of time of growth, development, and redevelopment before actually being unleashed upon the masses. So I wanted to chronicle the history of GPF as it happens, in the strange possibility that it might actually become popular and someone would ask me where it came from. I also wanted to take a little time and explain to the two or three of you out there who are actually interested just what processes I go through to create GPF, the strips and the Web site.

Genesis

GPF was an accident, like almost everything else of interest I've done. You might call it inspiration, and if so, God has one strange sense of humor. (I'm convinced of this fact already, but that's beside the point.) When I set myself upon the task of creating something new, raking my brains of hot coals and trying to force inspiration, it never happens. But when I'm usually not looking for it, it hits me like two-ton skydiving elephant who's parachute is full of holes. Thus, my creative process.

I had been working for IBM Global Services for perhaps a month or two when the idea hit me. Fresh out of college, I worked as a consultant to Lucent Technologies on a brand new contract, so processes were still new and a little rough. It took days before they got me a cubicle to work in (everything Dilbert tells you about cubicles is true). It was another week before I had a phone and a computer. So I did a lot of reading, and a lot of drawing. Drawing was always my favorite way of passing time. I draw most often when I'm bored, so I got a lot of pictures done in big meetings.

Eventually, I had all the necessary equipment. But, unfortunately, delays in other processes delayed our work, so there was a period of time where my team did little, if anything, productive. As new team members were added, we grew more and more anxious to do work. We played with our software and got acquainted to it, but without the data we were to be provided, we couldn't continue. So I drew a lot more.

Finally, one day, while my colleague Keith was using my computer to Web surf (he still didn't have a PC yet), I set myself to draw again, letting my mind wander and to expel whatever demons or angels took possession of my pen. And the result is what you find in Figure 1. As each character emerged, so did their personality and their purpose. Within a half-hour, I had gone from a bored, geeky computer programmer without anything to do, to a bored, geeky computer programmer without anything to do and a new comic strip on his hands.

Now, GPF was not my first attempt at comic strips. I have created at least a dozen little strips with different characters and situations over the years. "Slinky," "George and Ginger," "Kookamunga Tech," ... the list goes on. I had even submitted one of them to a local newspaper for publishing, but unfortunately, I wasn't mature enough to handle the responsibility (that, and I couldn't draw worth spit in those days). My heart truly belongs to comic books, but that's an even harder realm to break into. If only I could come up with a comic strip really worthy of the effort to work on....

Well, what do you know! I have one right here!

I struggled over the next few months to define the characters and determine who they were. It was a lot like getting to know new roommates in college. I lived with them, ate with them, talked with them,.... Sure, other people thought I was nuts, but I truly began to understand them. I began drawing little strips on lined notebook paper (which I had plenty left over from college), four on a side, eight to a page, a lot like the format you see in Figure 2. Before I knew what happened, I had fifty-odd pages lying around. If you do the math, that's over 400 comic strips! That's over a year's worth of material for a daily comic strip. I figured I must have had a winner.

(A note to all you budding online cartoonists out there: For the love of Pete, make sure to develop your project as fully as possible before you ever take it online! One of the biggest faults I often seen in new strips is a failure to develop and refine the original concept enough to know whether or not you have something that will generate plenty of material. Another big problem is many online cartoonists don't work very far in advance, if at all. I had over a year's worth of material before a single strip went online, and I managed to pad that out to about two and a half years. Advanced planning lets your characters grow and mature, so during that awkward phase when you're still new and struggling for readers, you can concentrate on making your strip the best it can be instead determining why a certain character behaves a certain way or just searching for a punchline.)

Strip Creation

A GPF strip undergoes a great transformation between the idea and the finished product. Each strip must pass through a strenuous process that usually entails sketches, resketching, disgust, crying to my wife about whether or not I should keep it up, inking, scanning, coloring, lettering, resizing, and accidentally wiping my hard drive and having to start all over again. Well,... everything but that last part. That hasn't happened. Yet.

As mentioned above, each strip usually starts as a rough sketch on notebook paper, like in Figure 2. For me, notebook paper has always been in abundance. A lot of my early comic strips and comic books were done on notebook paper, much to my art teachers' chagrin. I'm also a creature of habit; since I started drawing the initial sketches on notebook paper, it kinda became a habit to draw everything in pencil on notebook paper first. In the initial scripts, I got about eight strips on a page, front and back, which means three pages could hold four weeks worth of material (assuming the strip ran six days per week, which it did). Currently, I get an entire week, front and back (since Sunday strips are double-sized). Maybe someday I'll auction these off, if I ever get famous enough....

After the concepts are down, they have to be put in order. Since I just started throwing around strips to begin with, there wasn't a whole lot of order to them. When work began on the Web site, I knew I had to develop a definite GPF continuity. This often means a lot of note-taking and, in some cases, redrawing and rewriting the strips, especially the early ones. I like to stay ahead of the game, and often I have as much as a two months' lead on the daily strip. (Actually, this buffer has fluctuated greatly over the years, but I try to keep it around eight weeks. Vacations, injuries, and job fluctuations have whittled that down to four weeks or less upon occasion, but I try to rebuild that buffer whenever possible.) Sure, this means I can't do strips about pressing current events, but I rarely do anyway, and I can let the Web site do its thing while I go on vacation. :)

Once the order has been established, it's time to get down and dirty and draw some strips! I mean, pencil and ink them suckers. I usually draw two daily strips to a standard 9" by 12" piece of Bristol board, turned on its side. A single Sunday strip takes an entire sheet of Bristol. (I used to use 8¹/₂" by 11" typing paper, but once I tried Bristol board, I was hooked and never looked back.) I line up the paper with a good ol' fashioned T-square, then mark off the dimensions with a ruler and outline the strips. (I also used to use another piece of paper with the outline of the boxes already drawn on it, but it's kind of hard to trace through Bristol board.) The strips are penciled using a non-photo blue mechanical pencil, first lettering, then balloons, then characters and surroundings, and each is inked in turn. Typically, letting is not inked, since it would be deleted anyway to make room for the computer font I use. (You can see me at work during the drawing process with my faithful assistant, Randi the Wonder Kitty, in Figure 3.) Once the finished strips are ready, I scan them on a flat-bed scanner using bi-tone (black and white) scan mode. I scan them at 600 dpi (dots per inch) to get a good resolution for printing, such as for the book. Now they're ready for editing.

Once the strips are in the computer, I edit them using an ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro. I'll confess that the last shareware version I had was 420+ days into its 30-day trial. But I finally broke down and bought the real thing, which means (1) I'm legal, and (2) I get the manuals. Happy, happy, joy, joy. As I said, each strip is loaded into PSP, where it is converted to grayscale and edited. I replace most text with TrueType fonts, since my lettering, no matter how hard I try, is completely illegible in the finished strips. I will also do occasional coloring, like all those fancy gradient fills you're probably sick of seeing. Sunday strips, of course, are converted to full color, where I make that funky color shading you've all come to love. All digital editing is done using my handy dandy Wacom Intuos3 tablet, which is infinitely better than using a mouse. Once editing is complete, I retain a copy of the large scan for distribution to syndicates and publishers, then I make another copy that is resized for use on the Web page. Figure 4 shows PSP (or an older copy of it, that is) at work.

It has always been a long term goal, however, to move this process to an entirely digital format, ideally using all Open Source tools. I've recently purchased a tablet PC that will let me draw directly on the screen and allow me to carry it virtually anywhere. I've also been experimenting with various FLOSS packages such as the GIMP and Inkscape. For now, however, the process above is still the standard, and everything else is just an experimental variation.

Web Site

What about the Web site, you ask? Oh, you didn't ask. That's okay. I'll tell you anyway. The vast majority of the Web site is coded by hand. I find coding HTML by hand easier than using some clunky editor, and usually more efficient and less proprietary. The bulk of the site was coded this way during lulls at work... I mean, in my free time. I use various editors for the task, depending on what's handy; everything from vim, Microsoft Notepad, and Notepad++ has been included in my arsenal at one time or another.

The Web graphics were done much like the actual strips. I draw them by hand, ink them, then scan them bi-tone into Paint Shop Pro. Once there, I increase the colors to 16 million, then use all the fancy gradient fills and other bells and whistles to make them cool. Upon occasional I'll do things completely digitally, depending on time and other factors. Then I save them as PNG, JPEG, or GIF files (in order of preference) for quick and easy downloading. Animated GIFs, like the link icons, are created using Jasc's Animation Shop, which comes with PSP 5 and up.

When we first started, the GPF site made extensive use of Miva (formerly known as htmlscript), an XML scripting language that let me do CGI work. Since Miva was free from our old hosting service (and I love things that are free), I quickly taught myself how to code in it. After our move to Keenspot, I let their scripts and servers do the work, while I just sat back and relaxed. For the really curious, Keen uses a combination of UNIX crons and Perl to build all the necessary pages on a nightly basis. Nowadays post-Keen, this site runs mostly on PHP with a MySQL database backend, with occasional Perl scripts on crons to do automated, time-based tasks. Every line of code on the current site is hand-coded by yours truly. All the back-end PHP is optimized six ways from Sunday thanks to XCache.

Well, that's about it. GPF, from start to finish. Genesis to Revelation. I hope you've enjoyed this little romp through my mind and my server. Now get back to work before I tell your boss you were here.