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.

More of that wonderful “offbeat” humor I was talking about. I like this gag too. I cringe when looking at the original speech baloons though. I was still getting the hang of doing certain things back then. Eventually, I figured out a much better way of creating the balloons in Illustator and would later update the strip with what you see now. I would continue to learn neat new tricks to do with Adobe Illustrator throughout the course of working on the comic.

Commentary written in 2006.

Not one of my funniest strips, but it does establish Ribcage’s short temper and occasional hot-headed-ness. It also gives some background on what films Ribcage has been in, or at least, the actors he’s worked with. He appeared in House of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, House on Haunted Hill with Vincent Price, and Army of Darkness with Bruce Campbell.

Commentary written in 2006.

Joel Schumaker freaking sucks. You can quote me on that. He didn’t always suck. He use to make good movies. The Lost Boys is one of my favorite vampire flicks. But he totally lost it after the whole Batman fiasco. Batman Forever had its moments, mostly from the ever hilarious Jim Carey, but come on. Batman and Robin is the worst movie I have ever seen. Terrible, terrible piece of monkey poo. I loathe it.

I am a huge Batman fanatic, and the first movie got me, like so many people, really into comic books. For the first three Batman films, I owned the VHS tapes, the soundtracks on casette, the comic adaptations, the official movie souveneir magazines, t-shirts, toys, you get the picture. I will own the special edition DVDs sooner or later. But for Batman and Robin, I own nothing. Not a damn thing to remind me of that horrible putrid mess of a movie. Schumaker and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman should be ashamed of themselves (Akiva doubly-so for the very stupid Lost in Space movie). They practically killed the Batman franchise. I’ll take Superman IV: The Quest for Peace over Batman and Robin any day. And that’s all I have to say on the matter.

Commentary written in 2006.