Bat Boy the Comic Strip!

Hey, hi! As you may already be aware, I've decided to share some of my old comic strips with you over the next several months, starting with The New Adventures of Bat Boy.

I'm gonna TL;DR you first: The New Adventures of Bat Boy* is a strip I wrote & drew for the Weekly World News back in 2005, until they went tits-up in 2007. (They still exist, just not on paper.) If you'd like to read the rest of them, I'll be sharing them every weekday now through the end of December with any patrons pledging $3 or more. If you're not a patron yet, just click the $3 reward and BAM you'll start getting the strips. I hope you like it!

Here's the long post:

This strip has an appropriately mysterious backstory. Just after starting Girls With Slingshots (and broke as heck), I attended a convention called the Big Apple Con. It was in New York, and it was in the second floor of a building, and yet somehow it felt like a basement convention. I was sharing a half-table with my generous then-mentor Michael Lark, who was a guest. The floor was concrete, dark, and somehow leaking water from the ceiling.

I had a narrow three-ring binder on my table, sparsely filled with clear plastic sleeves containing home-printed GWS strips on regular printer paper. The edge of the table was scattered with hand-cut business cards, probably with my personal phone number on them. I hadn't yet learned to bring my own tablecloth.

Some guy walked up - it was dark, I don't remember what he looked like other than "older" and "male" - and thumbed through my GWS strips. 

"You make these?""Yeah, they're mine.""What do you do? Just the art?""The art, the writing... the website... all of it." He never made eye contact, just nodded thoughtfully and flipped me a business card. "We could probably use you." He left. The business card was for the editor-in-chief of the Weekly World News.

To my surprise, he got in touch with me first. Via e-mail, we started hashing out an original series - I pitched the idea of an emotional Sasquatch going on an adventure with an impatient shapeshifting alien who was visiting Earth to do research for his master's thesis. 

Halfway through developing the characters, he asked me if I wouldn't mind scrapping the original idea so I could pick up Bat Boy, the comic strip starring their flagship character. Peter Bagge had been working on it for God-knows how long, but was couldn't do it anymore. 

I took the job (after contacting Peter and asking if there was anything specific he wanted me to do/not do with the characters - he gave me his blessing to take it wherever I pleased). This was sometime in 2005. I discovered immediately that Bat Boy's roots were in West Virginia, so in the very first strip, I decided to bring him back home, to my own home state.

I think I carried over the undertones of the "emotional Sasquatch" idea when I wrote Bat Boy. He's tearing up right there in Strip One! Whenever I read about fantastical characters living in our human world, I can't help but think "they must feel so alone and misunderstood."

So if you're into stories about sweet sad characters just trying to fit in - and a lot of crying and screeching - stick around. Any patrons at the $3 level or up will get the full run of strips all the way to Christmas. Enjoy!

*Bat Boy is © The Weekly World News, obviously. He's not my character, but I had a great time getting to play with him. :)