When I first started working on this strip, I had a few goals in mind. I'd just gotten through yet another webcomics drama which had brought me out of a hiatus and I was looking for something to work on that would challenge me artistically as well as technically. I had been working on music using computer software and decided to experiment intigrating music into webcomics.
The other big reason I started working on THOSE WERE THE SALAD DAYZ was that my wife and I were expecting our baby daughter and we were thinking about moving to Vermont once she was born. This strip enabled me to get together with all my friends and spend a lot of quality time with them as I involved them in helping me create the strip and the music for it before our big move.
I cherish the year we spent playing music together and performing some of these songs in live settings. Many of my friends were inspirations for the characters in the strip and the three main MC's from the fictional band SQUAREPEGZ were voiced by their human counterparts in my real life hip hop band SQUAREROOTZ.
Upon arriving in Vermont after our long trek across the country from south Texas I had come to terms with the fact that I'd accomplished the two goals I'd set for myself with this strip: spending time with all my good friends and involving them in my work before leaving the Rio Grande Valley (Dirty Dirty South) and continuing to push those experimental webcomics boundries. The strip had even gotten a couple writeups.
So, yet another "noble failure" to add to my growing collection, only in my heart I know I got everything I wanted out of this even if I didn't finish the story.
By the time we'd left south Texas I had completed most of the instrumentals and songs for the comic. I also had a basic outline for 200+ episodes that would tell the tale of the bands' journey to the "BEATOFF" which included getting busted for selling pot brownies, acquiring a zombie busdriver named ZEN BOODAMASTAH, inadvertently opening a gateway to hell that would unleash a demon attack that would wreck the competition and finally losing a character in a glorious grand finale.
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