Enter the Cubes

November 21, 2014

www.SeaLeftStudios.com isn’t my first website. That honour goes to the sister site www.CubesComic.com, which I started in 2007 to house all of my Cubes comics.

So what are these Cubes comics? Well, here’s one for a start.

[Introduction]


Back in my university days, before the turn of the millennium, I would doodle in the margins of lecture notes. Out of those doodles emerged as a handful of characters that went on to become the Cubes. There’s a whole history to that, which you can read on the other site here.

I first started doing comics sporadically as the whim took me. In the beginning, I was mostly parodying superhero comics of the golden and silver age. Later, I developed what became Cubes proper when I created a number of characters in an office life setting. Those characters became the basis of the regularly released Cubes comic strip.

The first of these regularly scheduled Cubes semimonthly comic strips released on October 5th in 2005. This started “Year 1” of Cubes which ran from October 2005 through to the end of September 2006. New installments have always released on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of each month.

Why Wednesdays, you ask? Originally I’d planned to release them on Mondays. However, Cubes was different from my earlier comics in that it drew upon events I was seeing in my daily working life. As the release date neared, I grew nervous that my co-workers might not take the comics in the way they were intended as a gentle poking of fun at the absurdities of business life. I was so nervous about that release that I delayed it for two days, until the Wednesday. As it happened, there was no problem bringing out the comic and people at the office seemed to enjoy it.

The Cubes semimonthly comic strip has been the central feature of the Cubes website. It forms the main story timeline for the characters and all other Cubes materials—full length Cubes comics, superhero comics, adventure comics, even postcards—fit in and around this main timeline. As a result, I’ve come to measure the progression of Cubes in terms of the “years” of the Cubes semimonthly comic.

From October 2014 through to the end of September 2015 marks the tenth year of the Cubes semimonthly comic strip being produced. It’s astounding to me to think that I’ve been doing this comic strip for nearly a decade now. Especially so, considering that in the beginning I didn’t know if I would make it past the third comic strip. At that point I definitely wasn’t thinking in terms of years.

There are a lot of big developments coming to Cubes in Year 10. I’m planning a bunch of new story lines and characters that will carry Cubes well into its second decade of production. What those new story lines and who those new characters are, I can’t say. At least, not yet. What I can say is that I’m planning to supplement the regular 1st and 3rd Wednesday releases each month with additional special releases on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays as well. So Wednesdays. Mark the calendar. Tell your friends.

Also be sure to check back here over the coming months. All those years invested in creating comic strips have paid dividends in my prose writing. I’ve learned a lot about character and story development, dialog, and tight writing from doing all those comics. In the months ahead, I’ll be doing a series of posts on each of those areas and how the comics helped me with them. Maybe they’ll be helpful to others as well.

Keep on reading!