DS 85: Review of Yossarian


Digital Strips : Show 85
[6.09 MB]
Taking advantage of our audience Phil grabbed a strip from his recent plea for comics. Both of us found the strip to be done well but we both had our critiques. Those who like the art of Bloom County and a litte Paranormal investigation will find this strip just right.In this episode we talk about:

  • Yossarian by David Stroup
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    3 thoughts on “DS 85: Review of Yossarian

    1. Hi, guys — thanks for the kind review. I think a lot of your criticisms — especially about my strip being too wordy at times, and some of the storylines being a bit hit-or-miss — were spot on (though I hope folks will give it a chance).

      For the record: Yes, the strip was originally done for publication in a local community newspaper (it wouldn’t be too hard for anyone who can use Google to find it, but my bosses would probably prefer I didn’t directly name it or link to it). It originally ran once a week (no, I can’t do Sunday format strips with that detail daily). It isn’t running any more; I’m the editor now, and there was a bit of a disagreement with the higher-ups over what constitutes allowable subjects for humor. I’m posting the old ones while working on new material and practicing a web-based format and workflow — finding out what looks good at 72dpi, for example, and experimenting with digital lettering in the Digitalstrip font. The strip was actully started in high school and continued in college, and some of those REALLY old strips (in some completed story blocks) are available off my main Webcomics Nation page, as well as one sample of new work.

      There’s going to be a discontinuity in the future when I switch over to doing new work for the web… I still don’t know if I’ll go weekly, or go with a smaller format and try for three-a-week, or what.

      Again, for the record, the strips were drawn pretty large — 15″ wide I think — on bristol; I settled on a G-type dip-pen after the first few strips. The tone is real old-school tone film cut out, stuck down and then ‘shaded’ by shaving it with the edge of an x-acto blade (man, my co-workers came to hate that sound — scraping tone film is like fingernails on a blackboard).

      Paranormal investigation, per se, wasn’t intended to be the focus of the strip; earlier (and some later) strips do have them covering other things (often as an excuse for some pretty specific local news and issues satire). The Chupacabra storyline was specifically an attempt to extend that into a schtick for the strip… with mixed results. Upcoming strips include, well, more bigfoots, more around the office, some political satire, Lori’s pregnancy, yetis and family melodrama.

      Thanks for the mention, and I hope more folks will check it out as I count down to going realtime with new web strips.

      David Stroup

    2. The Show you were trying to think of for the sci-fi newspaper guy was “Kolchak – The Night Stalker”. Which is also a comic book now.

    3. There was a more recent show, which I thought was what they were going for. The whole newspaper was a front for some sort of paranormal investigation group, and “Pig Boy” (like “Bat Boy” in the Weekly World News, their iconic cryptid) worked in the basement, in the IT department, as their hacker. A quick Google says the show was called “The Chronicle,” 14 episodes, another quality SciFi Channel presentation.

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