This is the first “official” Grimstone comic strip and appeared on my 22nd birthday. Seemed kind of appropriate.

The process of developing Grimstone was long and difficult. I had been working on the characters for many years, through various different incarnations. While I was in college, especially my first year at Columbia (before I had to stop attending), I was developing Ribcage’s world into a dark fantasy/adventure story, something that I hoped I would one day produce as a series of animated films. The further along I got with that project, the less I liked it as it got farther and farther away from what the characters originally were. I decided it was time to get back to basics and started changing things around again. The idea I came up with was what I originally intended to do a comic strip about when I discovered KeenSpot. But I quickly realized that it still wasn’t ready. I hadn’t gone far enough back to my roots.

Grimstone was the result of wanting to do something more like what I had started out doing, just something funny and cartoony, with all the classic movie monster characters. I forget now just how I came up with the idea of Ribcage as an actor in horror movies, and all the other characters having some Hollywood connection. It was close to the original concept of The Ribcage Show that I had done as a kid (Ribcage and friends as stars of their own television show), but different enough that I didn’t feel like I was just repeating myself. This first week of comics are the first ideas I had for the strip and were all sketched out roughly on a piece of printer paper. Ideas continued forming and the world of Grimstone came together rather quickly.

Commentary written in 2006.