Clark-Gibson 5th Year Anniversary

I can't believe it's been five years already! Wow! Time sure does fly. I'm just glad that I'm still doing this after all this time.
Anyways, looks like it's time for another commentary article. It's been a while since I've done of one these, since I skipped last year. Hopefully I've remembered enough to give some interesting insights...

Concept Art from the Sketchbook!

In the last two anniversary articles, I posted a lot of concept art from various pieces of copy and notebook paper. However, I eventually switched over to a proper sketchbook, which is where I draw the majority of my concept art to this day. For the first time ever, pages from this sketchbook will be revealed!



Starting with... yet another character sheet! On this one, I tried to focus on size comparisons between the characters, and referred to this while making my comics.

And of course, we have the first sketches of Mr. and Mrs. Blobbert! I created these characters quite a long time ago. Obviously, I took different elements of Gibson's design and split them apart into two characters.
Dana originally wore an apron, but by the time the family visit storyline came along, I decided to trade that out for a sundress. Just felt more practical.
I believe this might be the first use of the Blobbert surname. In my head, it has a French pronunciation: blah-BAIR.

Grant and Tower. Tower seems a lot lankier here. I definitely try to draw him as a buff guy nowadays.
I've had the idea for a little machine gun coming out of his head for a while too. When I saw that I had labeled it as "Sentry" here, I had a quick panic to make sure that I changed it to "Turret" in the comic! It's an important detail to me, and if you know the definition of a turret, you might understand why.

Yet again, we have the return of the black spoiler splotches. You might be wondering why I don't just white these parts out and bring no attention to them. My answer to that is I like to leave things that linger in your mind. oOoOoOoOh...

Various miscellaneous characters. These come from multiple pages in the sketchbook, so I stitched them together, otherwise a bunch of images here would be mostly blacked out.

I believe this was the first drawing of Martini. Originally Gibson's family was just going to be his parents, but I wanted the Blobberts to be a more "nuclear" family, which usually have multiple children. Thus, Martini was created, using elements from his parents. So to recap, I split Gibson up to make his parents, then merged them back together to make Martini!

Also the first drawing of Erland. As for the origin of this character... uh... I honestly don't remember. "Cute but kinda creepy character who is in a position of authority" is the closest thing I can recall. While he is still just a banker, his role sort of expanded in my mind to be the de-facto "government" entity of Goals County.

The star of the current storyline, Grant! Admittedly, I don't have too much concept art of Grant I can show at the moment. In the meantime, have Grant's mouth! I haven't been able to show if off yet in the comic. It's similar to Clark's mouth shown in #048, but in an 'x' shape rather than Clark's '+' shape.

Concept sketches for Comic #100. Seems like I copied the part with Heron almost exactly into the comic. The most imporant parts of this sketch though are the designs of Clark's metamorphic stages and the little foes he fought. Seems like Gumdrop was the first to get a proper name.

Writing this, I realize that Comic #200 is approaching soon! I'll have to do something special for that as well.

Concept sketches for Comic #164. I don't usually do sketches for one-off comics, but I really wanted to make sure these characters looked old-timey. Popeye, Peanuts, The Muppets, and various "funny animal" cartoons were my main references for Percy and his friend here.

Here we have some stuff from the current storyline.

Gibbz here went through a few different designs, mostly going back and forth between him having legs or just a tail. Tail won out in the end, along with a snazzy shirt.
In the bottom right, you'll see that Gibbz was meant to have two groupies with him. I cut back to just one to reduce the overall drawing load. I think it still gets the point across he's the playboy type.

Now, Gibbz was always mean to slightly resemble another character, but it wasn't until writing this that I realized that their names are similar too. Huh.

At the top are early designs of the SALOON and barkeep. The barkeep is actually a slightly reused design from the Clark-Gibson Alpha era - the pirate octopus from the 2nd Anniversary article.
I actually forgot about the SALOON design here when I made the comic it first appeared in. I wish I did, because I think I like this one better. Oh well, I guess I can save it for something else down the road.

A bunch of different designs of the bar-goers, along with a couple of rejected ones.

I tried to focus on asymmetry for these guys. The Barkeep's lop-sided head and odd-number limbs, and the two-headed guy, for example. I even added the one sock to the big-haired girl for this reason.

Uaraki, the big hunchback, took a few tries to get a look I was comfortable with. One design involved turning his legs into some wheeled-stand setup. I thought this was neat, but really didn't fit the character I was going for.

And at the very bottom, I made a quick little layout of the bar. Didn't want to repeat the mistake of the Jailbreak storyline!

Comic Rough Drafts and Commentary

#122: Grant

Above Clark and Grant are a little oval and triangle (their nose shapes) respectively. I used these in multiple comics during the storyline to indicate which is which from a distance. They're a pair of clones, after all!

The last panel is nearly identical to the last panel in Comic #107, the comic where Clark was named. As you can expect, there's a lot of mirroring throughout this storyline.

In case you're wondering, Grant is named after Ulysses S. Grant, a U.S. president.

#125: Fun with Grant

Complicated feelings on this one. For starters, I like the panel with Cutlass, and the little teaser towards Gibson's family in the first and last panels.
But man, WHAT was going on with Gibson?? He looks fine in the rough draft, but if you check the final comic, his eyes are huge. Its been bugging me ever since.

#128: Overcome Who

It was important to show the small differences between Clark and Grant during this storyline. I think this comic and the one before it are good examples. Grant is a lot more focused on his goal than Clark is, and doesn't care for much else.

In the final comic, the video game they're playing is just something I made up on the spot. The skull king enemy is based off a boss for some platformer GameMaker game I made a long time ago that never went anywhere.

#133: Blown Back

This one went through quite a bit of changes. The first two panels got merged into one, I added a big impact panel following the previous comic, added another one of Grant on the ground, and even got rid of the last panel entirely!
I think Gibson being reflected in Grant's eye is cool though.

#138: Halloween '23

If you used to watch Homestar Runner back in the day, you may remember their Halloween specials, where all the characters dressed up as characters from various other media.
While I try not implement any pop culture references in my comics, I have always enjoyed this idea, and figured Halloween would be an appropriate exception. Hoping to do another this year!
In case you're wondering who's dressed as what: Clark, Gibson, Cutlass, Grant, and Shogi

#155: Super Martini

Jumping a good bit ahead, we have another comic that went through quite a big change.
In the original, I think it started out as Clark showing off his fighting moves and Martini being uninterested. Problem is, this didn't really fit with Martini's personality as a rambunctious troublemaker, so I changed it to a game of pretend that turns painful.

#156: Suppertime

Oh boy, probably one of the longest comics to make. Just a lot of little details in this one big panel. I forgot to draw Gibon's shirt too. Really proud in how it came out though!

You may have noticed that I don't have too many comics from the family visit storyline here. I guess I just don't have much to say on each individual comic, but I did want to talk about it overall.
From very early on, I wanted to do a storyline where we meet Gibson's family. What exactly would happen, though, was kind of up in the air. There was one idea where there would've been a shape-shifting antagonist who sneaks into the house and disguises themselves as Gibson's dad!
Eventually, it ended up being a low-stakes story with little to no conflict. Cutlass and Shogi were added to cause some chaos, but I didn't want to let these guys hog the spotlight from the Blobberts. It made sense to me to just have interactions between the family and the guests.
The comic ended a bit abruptly as well, I think. That's just because I wanted to wrap up this storyline before taking my hiatus which ended up being much much longer than I wanted.

#166: A Different Path

On now, onto the current storyline!
This was definitely meant to have a lot of dialogue, so I had to leave a lot of space when I drew this out.
Now let's talk about Grant's knapsack. I just didn't feel like drawing it in every panel! When Grant ran out of canned sausages, it was time to leave it behind. But what about Grant's knives? Even though they're in the second panel here, you'll see they're not in the final comic! Again, didn't want to draw them all the time, so story-wise, Grant lost them while fighting through all those ground leeches. That's my explanation. Yeah.

#173: The Bouncer

More specifically, the big panel of #173, along with the last panels of #161. I like to re-use paper when I can.
Anyways, if you look at the final comic, you'll notice a pretty glaring error. Grant reels back a punch with his left hand, but Tower catches his right hand! Yikes!
Yeah, just felt like I should've brought that up. Don't worry, I'm aware!

#181: Old Tower

The most recent comic!? Cutting it close, aren't we?
This one was pretty hard to figure out what layout I wanted. Originally it was going to be a standard six-paneler, but I just couldn't come up with a sixth panel. I compromised and made it a five-paneler, but even that was contentious on which panel should be the big one! At first, the third panel with the monstrous silhouettes was going to be it. It was the coolest looking for sure. However, I felt having the big panel being the final one really drove home what I wanted to convey. A big, empty nothingness at the end of Tower's story...

Closing

And that's all she wrote. It's been two years since the last commentary article, yet it feels closer to just a year. I guess that's what happens when you take a half-year hiatus, huh? Sheesh.
Regardless, I thank you all once again for sticking with me. I've been doing this for half a decade already, and yet, Clark-Gibson is nowhere near complete! Long-form projects like these are... something, to say the least. Something that I think deserves a lot more words than what I have left for this page.
Also, if there's any other comics you want my input on but didn't mention here, let me know!

Anyways, stay tuned! The storyline with Grant here will be reaching it's end soon, but it definitely won't be the last we see of him.
Until then, stay safe, stay good, stay healthly. Thanks for reading!

Back to Other Hub