Build-a-Baddie Returns (And It’s Bigger, Badder, and More Chaotic)
The last Build-a-Baddie Poll was such a hit, it spun off not one but two projects — a microfic and a 1,500-word short story!
So naturally… we’re doing it again.
Welcome back to Build-a-Baddie — the crowd-sourced character experiment where you decide:
I take your winning combo and turn it into a brand-new illustration.
There’s also a Wildcard section if you want to whisper your weirdest ideas into the void. No promises… but I will read them.
Voting opens this week on Patreon. Bring your best (and worst) ideas.
Transcript — Evolution Success Stories
A single-panel cartoon shows two bug-like creatures standing on a forest floor surrounded by large green leaves. Both have tall, thin, purple bodies with spindly limbs and antennae. The bug on the right has colorful, symmetrical butterfly wings with orange, black, and white patterns and looks relatively normal — an evolution success story The bug on the left has a strange, mismatched set of wings that resemble bold, graphic signage instead of natural wings. The wings are black with bright orange arrows and large words pointing in different directions, including “TASTY,” “HERE,” and “YUM!” with arrows directing attention toward the bug’s own body. The malformed-wing bug looks uneasy, while the butterfly-wing bug looks on. Beneath the comic, a caption reads: “All I’m saying is… it’s easy to be a fan of evolution if all you hear about are the success stories…”
To the right of the panel is a blue box that reads: “Intermission — The Evil Inc storyline will continue next week.”
Greystone Flashback: Trever
Today’s comic features a cameo appearance by Trever, who started as an
intern at
Greystone Inn and worked his way up to
assistant producer.
What you may not know is that I considered spinning Trever off into his own strip. I had been doing
Greystone Inn for a couple years (and was quite pleased with its progress), but I still harbored interest in becoming syndicated at that point. I knew the syndicates would never accept
GI, but after reading an article about a new demographic group — Boomerangers — I thought I had a good concept for a strip that a syndicate
might accept. Boomerangers, the story said, were kids who graduated college and then moved back in with their Baby Boomer parents. Seeing the number of comics that the syndicates launched that seemed to be based on nothing but demographics, I decided to pitch a strip based on Boomerangers.
So, I produced a
four-week storyline that featured Trever and his decision to move in with his parents after graduating college. I packed it up and shipped it off to all of the major syndicates, confident that I was finally ahead of the curve. I had my demographic, I had my characters, and I had my cartooning up to the level that I thought I could attract the attention of an editor.
Needless to say, I was rejected all around.
