I like to tell people Aarin's Desk was spawned during a Delirium Tremor hallucination, which would be fun—if it were true. But it's not a lie when I say AD is a webcomic satire, though it's a satire on my lifestyle as much as it's a satire on webcomics or the world we live in. I've always felt the best satire is presented as a legitimate story with a read-between-the-lines undertone of straight-faced comedy.
In all honesty, I can't really remember starting it, though it's only three months old at the time of this article. I'd been involved in a 'show us your desktop thread' in the MTC forums, and I think the labeling process helped characterize the personalities residing in my workspace. Already having a digicam and webspace, and now the inspiration to try something I've wanted to do for years, I went for it.
Given how established most great sites on the interwebs are, there's an immediate threshold of discouragement one has to cross to enter the fray. Obscurity is hell; competing in a flooded market is hell. Then again, that's the same with writing, art, music, or the high-end dream-job employment market. Too many bad-asses that have been doing it longer and better. Do I ever care about that?
Ya'll should know me by now.
I said 'fuck it.' People should always get their voice, their energy, into the mix and let life sort out the results. I don't take it seriously, which is why I never run out of ideas. If anything, I'm amazed at how much effort I've put into making it not suck.
As far as the comic itself, I'm happy I had nine months of basic webdesign experience--that bit went smooth and easy. It took more time to shoot and size the navigation buttons than it did to code the layout. I made an early commitment to keep the webdesign uncluttered (the strips are messy enough).
I have no talent with drawing, but years with photography, so the artistic direction was inescapable. I experimented early on with dulling the stages (backgrounds) to make the characters 'pop,' but decided clutter, chaos, and vibrant colors set a far better tone. My rampant overuse of filters is common with all my 'art,' so much that I've become the 'NEEDS MOAR LENS FLARE' poster-boy. I bear zero shame about that.
The hard part was setting a theme, tone, and personality to the comic and its characters.
In writing, it's a blessing, and necessity, to have characters with a well-developed voice, be they archetypes, having ten pages of backstory, or simple representations of people you know. For me, the character development process always comes down to giving the characters a stage, a topic, and a fuzzy outline (personalities). Then I allow them to fill in their color and shading through their action and dialogue.
Anthropomorphic objects should fit their visual cue without being a cliché—rather they should surpass their cliché's. Sure, Skulls is caffeinated, the Chips are a collective, and Busch cusses like a trucker, but the slightest touch of depth disrupts their pigeonholes. Pixar/Dreamworks sets the bar pretty low on that.
I didn't want a gag-a-day, but a running plot of conversations that would overlap over the course of its lifetime. I'll be damned if I ever mention a video game, but I will interrupt for holidays, because that's just fun. The original eight strips shame me, but they present basic characterization without the devastating-club-of-trying-too-hard.
I'm not sure where the comic will go, if I'll ever learn to make a proper speech bubble, or how long I'll run it, but as with every project I undertake, it's been fun, educational, and rewarding. I see no reason to stop, and the feedback has been 95% positive—usually it's the people who don't like you that speak up. Pipedreams of professional webcomic superstardom/popularity are not my goal, or expectation, far from it. But I would like to share my bullshit with as many people as would read it. As much as I make Aarin's Desk for no real reason, I make it to be enjoyed by an audience.