'Geekz' Hits its First Century

It's not often I feature a real person in this strip, but the 100th edition of my weekly geeky webcomic demanded something special.

I also decided to colour it myself, for the first time ever.

Arf & Mo...are Coming!

Now available: the first issue of Arf & Mo - anarchic animal antics featuring the titular duo of Chaz & Frang's warped creation: Arf, a bloated beer-swilling German Shepherd and Mo, his psychotic and twisted white lab rat buddy. Together, the pair have lurched through a series of bizarre, satirical and downright crazy lowbrow adventures over the last ten years, and this compilation brings together some of the best moments of their cartoon careers to date.



The original Arf & Mo was privately printed in 2001 and barely saw the light of day, but now they're back, in a big bumper collection that no fan of scabby, underground toilet humour should ever be without. At 40 pages, including a new foreword from creator Chaz detailing the misfit duo's origins, it's a must!

Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts...

...especially if it's any of this bunch of dysfunctional IT support clowns.

The idea of a webcomic based around an IT support desk came to me a couple of years ago but it was only last year in 2009 that I started to do something about it, and only now that I've found a (albeit temporary) place to display them publically.

As anybody who draws comics knows, it's really 80% writing and 20% artwork. Most of the real work is in thinking, writing, fine-tuning a few words for the best possible payoff. If the gag, the joke, the concept are great, it doesn't matter how lame the artwork is - two of the greatest cartoonists of the 20th Century, Schulz and Thurber, had minimal technical ability.

If the joke is a dud, or the writing lame, I don't think it matters how eye-catching the art is, the strip will fail. As such, in this series I'm seeking to focus my energy on honing something that is written as succintly and with as much character as I can pack into three frames. This means that the art is more minimal than I would normally prefer, but that is also a bonus - it means I'm not spending countless hours drawing the thing, and on a different level, the recycling of stock scenes and characters throughout helps to enforce the sense of repetition and familiarity of life day in, day out, in an office environment, a sense of tedium which perhaps only the off-the-wall personalities of the characters can penetrate.

As to why I decided to write about a bunch of geeks on a technical helpdesk, this was in no way related to my own personal experiences of working beside a bunch of geeks on a technical help desk. Reality could never translate into the world of Tomasz, Arnie, Mungo and company, which is more akin to a little-remembered 1990s TV comedy show I used to enjoy a lot, titled "Dweebs".

For sure, there are plenty of other IT-related strips out there. But this one has one difference: set on an email-based helpdesk, many of the gags are text-based rather than sight, or dialogue, based. This is where the writing comes in that I mentioned earlier, though I will be mixing it up with a variety of humour styles.

In any case, it's early days yet but enjoy these free samples, I hope. I may post more in future here if a more high-profile home can't be found in the short term...