Apartment 4H

Blast from the past Posted Tue, 09/01/2009 by Dave in response to Dave’s Week Part 2

Okay, so still not funny, and still not making a great deal of sense–but this one’s interesting for purposes historical perspective!

Before Joe and I decided to do a comic together, we contemplated doing them on our own (before coming to the conclusion that to make it work we would need a writer/artist). I had a rough horsemen of the apocalypse-related idea, and in my own meager way did some little doodles in my notebooks. In their original incarnations, War, Pestilence and Death looked basically like you see them here. Also of interest (as you may be able to deduce from the art) is that in these early proto-sketches Death was female. I attribute this to reading a lot of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics during my second year, while the comic was in its mental gestation period.

Originally the fourth horsemen was supposed to be Famine (the giant stomach) meaning Pestilence wouldn’t be alone in having a non-human physique. This didn’t work for a number of reasons–it made no sense, but in a bad way (a stomach is not its own life form), it wasn’t as cute or endearing, and it’s really hard to write jokes about famine without being very tasteless (this last one proved to be a rather prophetic insight as that was what started the whole comic controversy!). I did wind up doing a couple of comics in this style for a friend’s shitty webcomic (it was actually titled Shitty Webcomic, and sadly is defunct), but decided I was pursuing a fruitless end and abandoned the idea.

Until, at least, a comic author for the Cavalier Daily who I’d asking in passing about doing a comic connected me with Joe. The rest, as they say, is history.