Alright kids, this weeks Suckerpunch Spotlight is a
very special issue. It's the one year anniversary of
Stumblebum Studios! This week is the brain child behind this
boxing themed website. My pal Paul Milligan. If you haven't
checked it out before, Paul's comic, Der Wondervolle Bean,
is a crazy misadventure of a dude, a scientist and a talking
bean. Funny stuff I tell you.
Here's the Q and A.
STUMBLEBUM STUDIOS - What's your earliest memory of
comics or comic strips?
Paul Milligan - Gosh, that's tough, my memory is
awful. Uhm… I remember collecting comics when I was just a
youngin' living in merry old England. A lot of the comics
were these big magazine sized things and I got
M.A.S.K., Action Force (which is what they called G.I.
Joe over there… crazy Brits) and Thundercats. I used to draw
pictures of the characters and send them into the magazines
hoping that one day I'd get printed in one of the fan art
sections. But they spurned my youthful advances. Now it's
all about revenge, baby!
SS - What projects are you working on right now?
 PM
- Well, I'm constantly working on stuff for Stumblebum
Studios like my article and comic reviews and things like
that. And of course there's my comic strip,
Der Wundervolle Bean that I try to post up at least four
times a week.
I've been kinda slacking on The Bean lately
because I'm working on a sixteen-page comic called Mars:
1938 (with some hack named Dave Sherrill) which we're going
to debut on
Free Comic Book Day at
Titan
Comics and CAPE con at
Zeus Comics.
There's a ton of other projects I'm working
on like
Twilight, which is slowly but surely getting done,
various comic book scripts and the occasional freelance
design projects. Oh, and my crappy day job. If it wasn't for
the heavy drug use I really don't think I could cope.
SS - Der Wundervolle Bean has changed a lot since you
first started the comic, what were the changes and how did
they come about?
 PM - When I first started doing the Bean strips it
was for
24
Hour Comics Day and I hadn't really drawn anything of
substance for a loooong time. I think you can tell when you
look at those first fifteen or twenty strips, I had no idea
what I was doing. They're awful looking, to me anyway. I
think I was about 30 or 40 strips in when I really started
being happy with the stuff I was producing. I started
experimenting with the format and trying to challenge myself
to draw more difficult things.
As the strip went on I was constantly learning things,
lettering tricks, facial expressions, hand gestures and so
on. For the most part though, the strip remained relatively
the same until the beginning of this year when I completely
changed the format. I was kind of inspired by a lot of the
other webcomics I was reading at the time and most of them
had that "daily newspaper" format going on and I decided to
give it a try. Unfortunately the first several strips using
that format were pretty much a disaster. They were all
recap, originally meant to catch up new readers on what had
happened in the previous strips, but it was soooo wordy and
really not that funny and didn't even feature any of the
main characters. It was just a cartoon version of me
standing around talking. Ugh. That's why that series of
strips ends with me getting shot in the head by one of the
Bean characters, cause I was just so frustrated with myself
at that point. Mostly I was just using those first few
strips to experiment with the format.
 Then I started a really huge story that was leading up to
the 100th strip. There was so much stuff I wanted to do that
most of those strips were double-sized so I could fit
everything in. I was getting more comfortable with the
characters and the humor so I decided to ramp up the
complexity of the story and added a bit of drama too. And
#100 itself ended up being huge, and was about six times
the size of the regular strip. Plus it ended with a pretty
huge cliffhanger that sorta changed the dynamic of the
strip. I don't think I've ever been more excited about the
Bean than when I was doing that storyline.
Once I'd hit that 100th strip I really wanted to change
things up a bit. I was getting kinda tired of the way the
characters looked and I wanted to play with that. Now that
I've got a two-year old for a nephew I've been exposed to a
lot more cartoons and I started really getting into some of
them and digging the amazing style and character design that
some of these shows have. I really wanted to incorporate
some of that kind of stuff into the look of the strip. I
can't tell you how happy I am with the way it turned out.
And the strip is constantly changing. I'm always learning
new stuff or tweaking stuff to make the strip look better.
If only I could get the hang of drawing backgrounds.
SS - Where do you see yourself (in relations to comics)
in five years?
PM - Bitter and angry and cursing my peers for their
success.
Seriously, I'm really not sure. I hope that in five years
I'll have published some of the comics I'm currently working
on. Right now I'm just trying to take it one day at a time
and not let myself get too complacent.
Or hell, who knows, maybe I'll be writing Superman comics
and lighting my cigars with fifty-dollar bills.
Remember when we were watching that Tenacious D video and
Jack Black gave Kyle Glass that friendship medallion and
when they parted company they said "Friendship!" We should
start doing that, ok?
PM - Uh…
SS - Sum up the last year of Stumblebum Studios, please.
PM - We've done a heck of a lot better over the last
year that I thought possible. Hell, the fact that we still
exist amazes me. It's been a fun year for sure. We've had
columns and columnists come and go (and come back again.)
We've added some amazing talents to our pool of creative
genius. I think we're accomplishing what we set out to do,
which is create a place for talented guys to showcase those
talents and to entertain our readers by constantly updating
and adding new stuff to the site. We've gone from just over
a thousand visitors a month to almost three thousand
visitors a week! We've self-published our own
comics and we've appeared as guests at comic conventions
all over Texas. It's been a really good year so far and
we've accomplished so much, thanks to our amazing
contributors and our fans. I can't wait to see how well the
next year is going to go.
By the way, Dana wants us all to start wearing these
tracking collars that he can use to shock us whenever a
column is late. Now that's progress!
SS - Alright let's say there really was a Fast Food War,
with all the little foods driving tanks and firing guns, who
do you think would win?
PM - I want to say Whataburger… cause I loves me some
Whataburger. Plus, they're 100% American Beef, baby! I think
they'd put up a hell of a fight. But ultimately McDonalds
would win through sheer numbers. Over one billion served… TO
DEATH! Unless maybe there's some Iranian fast food chain
I've never heard of. They could just nuke everybody else?
SS - Friendship!
PM - Friendship!
Check out more of Paul's stuff at
www.stumblebumstudios.com
or
http://der-magic-bean.livejournal.com/
And as always check out Dave's mindless pap at
http://www.culturalvoid.net
|
Stumblebum Studios Archives