Monday - January 31, 2005:

I hit bottom with this format on the day I wrote the five panels above. I feel like I have a decent handle on the four or five panel format, but I was bored with it. I've done nearly 1000 strips at this point (here's one of the early ones ca. 1993), and I'm proud of a few dozen, a high percentage of them in this run on HB. I enjoy the characters and the concept, but I don't always have a funny ending. Life isn't always funny endings. I don't view it as my job to come up with funny endings.

I'm going to be real honest about the whole creative process behind HB for a moment. Often, when I write strips, I go where I feel like for the first four panels and That's not always funny. I'm after absurd, ridiculous, ironic, but rarely pure funny. To be sure, I've done plenty of gags in those thousand strips, but they're the strips I'm least proud of. Instead, it's strips like Today's that I enjoy. I hope it leaves someone with a little huh? -the vaguest sense of a question. I guess That's why I've been so interested in the more cryptic of the photo-comics lately. I can't get the damn gargoyles from Sinister Bedfellows out of my head and there's something appealing about that.

On a more concrete note, to strip every last shred of story from the HB Comic-Blog I've opened up the comic-strip review concept to other media, websites, blogs, movies, music, products, food. Whatever creations creators want to throw at the boys, they'll take a crack at reviewing them. For details, [Read More].

Oh and there are still a couple of comic reviews in the hopper. Check out all the upcoming reviews on the new-fangled HB Reviews Calendar.

-Bob Stevenson