Rule Zero - Page 8 of 8 - Updates Monday and Wednesday

Thanks Everyone!

on July 17, 2012 at 10:55 am
Posted In: Gratitude

We’ve been getting a lot of good feedback regarding the comic lately, and I wanted to take the chance to thank everyone for reading, commenting, and coming back for more. From art to writing, I’ve been pretty happy with our work so far, which is a new feeling for me. Like any artist, I’m particularly hard on my own stuff. In the past it was hard to put up material, because I would pick it apart dozens of times before I was even finished with it. I’ve been pretty good about not redoing entire comics at 1:00 in the morning though!

I haven’t really drawn anything like the fourth panel before, but I think I’m happy with it. If you can’t tell, Dio’s weapon of choice for this encounter is his umbilical cord. Here’s a larger version of the fourth panel:

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I Was The Hero The Mountain Needed

on July 9, 2012 at 7:37 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I had a paladin once who always tried to “address the people”.

He was one of the leaders in a group of survivors, gathered together after the elven forces began taking over the continent with an army of elementals. My paladin and the other PCs were more or less the final hope for these people, and we managed to hold up in a mountain on the southern tip of the continent.  It was there we made our final stand against the elves.

From time to time my paladin, when not being pestered by the goblin cleric in our party to convert to his religion, would talk to the people. Problem is, I’m a terrible speaker, so most of my “speeches” would be nothing more than repeated ramblings about perseverance in the face of danger, reassurances on reclaimed land, and one botched eulogy for the goblin cleric PC mentioned earlier.

Perhaps the most memorable speech was regarding one of our new party members.

After our first major victory against the elves, we recruited a young boy who literally fell out of the sky at the end of the previous session. This boy was no more than 13 or 14 years old. He was a timid kid who carried a crossbow with him as his primary weapon. Now, the thing about him was that he was possessed by the spirit of his dead mother, who was evil to the core and was prone to taking over her son’s body whenever he was in trouble (or she just wanted to throw down).  Our group was aware of this, and we it came time to bring this frightened child into the mountain, we felt it best to let everyone know up front.

During the introduction of the kid to the people, and letting everyone know about his unique situation,  someone in the crowd asked: “So…is he evil, or what?”

I looked over to the kid and used Detect Evil. Sighing, I turned back to the crowd.

“All I see is evil”.

After recovering from the laughter the other PCs and I had over that terrible choice of words, I quickly tried to salvaged the situation with something to the accord of “Hey, this spell of mine only detects evil! It doesn’t detect good or like, muffins.”

My group tried to stop me from making too many speeches after that.

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The Unexpected Journey

on July 2, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I never thought I’d be here.

When it came to potential creative works, a webcomic was not on the table for me. Certainly, I love webcomics (read’em every day!). I follow webcartoonists on twitter and listen to webcomic podcasts. But I never really thought about working on one myself. Imagine my surprise when I find myself working on a comic with my brother!

This is kind of wild to me. I’m working on an actual creative endeavor here, one that people world wide will be able to see. It was different before when I was simply writing a blog so that my friends can read it. Now I’m writing a comic with my brother, and it’s out there for an audience larger than five people. I’m pretty excited about it.

I hope you’ll enjoy your time here as much as I’m enjoying this! Writing a comic with Pedro is pretty awesome, and I don’t know that I would trade it for anything else.

 

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Save vs. TLDR

on July 2, 2012 at 4:00 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

Nine years ago I gave up being a cartoonist.

Years ago I did a comic called Memoirs of a Bored Student, or MOBS for short. The comic fell through, and I spent a long time struggling to get back into cartooning. Now I’m back, however, with my brother Frankie to bring you Rule Zero, a strip about a group of tabletop gamers trying to survive dungeons, monsters … and themselves.

I’ve tried starting comics over and over again, and nothing stuck. It was actually my brother Frankie who pushed me to do a comic about a gaming group. We started talking, and it wasn’t long until we both realized that this was a comic we needed to do together. He had to really talk me into doing a tabletop comic, but I should have realized it was inevitable.

The other day I was going through old gaming stuff when I found a weird greenish folder. Opening it up I found something I’d all but forgotten about. It was the first comic I had ever drawn. It was a comic about the group that played in my D&D games. It was then that I remembered how I got started with comics. An old friend, Aaron, pushed me into doing a comic about our group. It wasn’t long before I was writing page after page of comics about the outlandish, ridiculous things that happened in our games.

I never thought about doing comics before then. Now, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.

Thanks to my old friend Aaron, for pushing me to write about our old characters. Heroes such as Conan, Gandalf (the First, Second, and Third), Primus, Spike, and all the ninjas that Dante played.

Thanks to Frankie, for creating this with me, and helping me realize that what I really needed to do was to go back to my roots.

And most of all, thanks to my beautiful wife Jess, who won’t let me give up, won’t let me get discouraged, and didn’t let me give up on my dream.

See you all next Monday!

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