Heya Joe.

Fantastic as always but whatever happened to Ted's shifty eyes from back in the March strips. Just been rereading the old strips and I miss those crazy black bits behind his eyes :)

Hiya Blagman,

Thanks for the response, and for continuing to read ted's odd little adventures.

As for those mischevious little black bits behind ted's eyes, well they've caused me much fretting and indecision.

You see in the early days of Ted, when the comic and character were just a wee seed in the back of my mind, I was heavily influenced by the art of Mike Mignola (he of Hellboy fame) and Ralph Steadman (illustrator to the late Hunter S. Thompson).

Both of these artists use black/shadow heavily in their work, particularly Mignola. When I started work on the comic I was interested in mimicking (badly I might add) this kind of style, so Ted quickly adopted characteristics such as the dark brooding eyes and intense shadowing.

While I think this worked to an extent, and seemed to go down well with the people I showed the strip to, I wanted to develop the comic further, to support a wider variety of subject matter. With this in mind I made ted a bit brighter, and minimized the shadows so I could concentrate more on facial expressions and gestures.
I also quite like the idea that the strip now looks quite cartoony and commercial, and yet often the content is bleak and anti-commercial (contradiction between image and subject is always something I've been interested in).


Of course it's all still a development process. What I really enjoy about doing a strip like this is that by looking back over the backlog of comics you can see how the character and design have progressed, and it means good folks like you can give comprehensive feedback about what aspects of the strip you like and don't like.

I'm aware that this is a slight ramble, and will probably become void since it's likely somewhere down the line I'll decide to put the black bits behind the eyes back in... ho-hum.

If you've reached this point and resisted the urge to yell out "My God! He's full of shit!", Thanks, and thanks once again for the feedback, I really do appreciate it, and I hope you'll carry on coming back.

Cheers
-Joe