http://www.journeyintohistory.com/The strip for June 1, 2005.
Herein follows the account of RCAT as set down at the site...
It's tough but fair.
Hi everyone, the infamous RCAT here. This Panels thing was ST's idea, and I got involved. The challenge he issued to me was that we each got to do one panel each, and then move it back. We have both broken this rule from time to time, and frankly I feel it is when we are prepared to break these boundaries that the strip gets some momentum going - the problem then is always that the other one feels dominated and responds by destroying all plot points introduced.
"A very slow IM conversation." Yes, definitely. When I got involved it was just a bit of fun throwing the idea back and forth. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn't really. Our big problem is each other - because there are two of us and we never directly communicate about the direction that the strip is taking outside of each panel.
It is, as you say, a concept rather than a story. I often forsake the idea of evolving story for the sake of a stupid gag - I guess I'm just that kinda guy. The odds of the strip taking a large leap beyond this level of occasionally very garbled slapstick can feel very low quite a lot of the time.
The monkey was me setting up the gag about unoriginal characters, and Zombies just seem to turn up in webcomics no matter what you do.
Frankly, I appreciate that the art I do on Panels is far from my best work (i put much more effort into my other comic:
http://ktonktonk.thinkshiny.com - I attempt to update every weekend, but fail quit regularly too), but that is because I try NOT to put too much time and effort into the idea: because of the easily dissassembled nature of the story, I find that you don't want to think too hard about the ideas, A) you'll slow it down (and we can get pretty bogged down by outside influences), and B) if you spend some time coming up with an idea you really love, it will fail. (Pessimistic, no?)
ST and I did not know each other very well when we started this experiment - we both liked to draw and had varying success with our own comics up to this point.
The most interesting thing? Even today, more than a year after we started working on this thing (if I remember right), we have never met, we have only spoken on the phone a couple of times. Our main communication has been through Livejournal (where we met via friends of friends from other countries... yet we are both Australians...), ICQ, and most heavily through this comic.
So if you like, take it as a train of thought demonstration of two cartoonists getting to know one another through attempting to make a comic.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
panels![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
