Hello, all.

I have spent the last three months of my life creating a new kind of webcomic. A webcomic without art. A webcomic without point. A webcomic about hats.

And I’ve nearly finished creating sufficient backlog to combat my insecurity, so I’m settling on a launch date of the 30th of March 2009 (which is a Monday), at which point, the comic will be published at the frequency advertised in the banner. (Mondays, Wednesdays and, indeed, Fridays, for those reading this in RSS readers or some such who are having to live without the banner.)

I hope it will be fun. Do join me.

Today is the launch of Behatted, a webcomic about small hats.

Well, if I’m honest, it’s more a webcomic about people, who just happen to be represented by small hats. Unfortunately, I have the relative artistic ability of a chimp with two broken arms, and cannot even draw the curtains. But I’ve loved the comic form since the age of ten, and this is a way for me to finally work in it. After a fashion.

And it’s not as if there’s no artistic ability involved at all. The backgrounds, lovingly created in MS Paint, are… well, nowhere near as bad as I expected them to be. (The fact that you are viewing the final comics at a much smaller size than I “drew” them helps.)

Anyway, I’m not going to drag this blog entry out too long, as I probably shouldn’t build the above up as the Citizen Kane of webcomics. It is what it is; we have jokes, an ongoing mystery plot and lots of hats. I’ve created up to episode 39, mostly out of paranoid terror and determination not to be one of those webcomics that goes lurching off schedule, and I’m even quite proud of some of them.

That’ll do for now. This blog will update sporadically, whenever I have thoughts to share that pertain to the comic, in some remote manner. If you’d like to hear me ramble about rather less pertinent issues, I have a personal blog for that, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Enjoy. (Hopefully.)

As threatened the other day, a short blog-musing about the excitement of having a comic of mine drawn by a proper artist. (This could well be pretentious. I’m sorry if it goes that way, I did try. The good news is, I’m meant to be going out inside the next ten minutes, so this will be nowhere near as tediously long as it could have been.)

Anyway, as reported in the newspost of Behatted episode #5, an aspiring comic artist/cartoonist called Aaron Bir drew a cartoon of mine. And I could well be embarrassing him by going on about it, because he can actually draw, whereas I can’t and occasionally am a little bit too awe-struck by those who can’t.

Plus, the writing of comic scripts has long been a heavy aspiration of mine, and having them illustrated by proper professional artists of course, and anything which brings me a step closer to this goal is automatically very very good.

The comic in question can be seen here, it’s called “Scruff”, and it’s about a boy, a cat and a zebra. I did consider trying to attempt some kind of massive philosophical epic, but the remit was 3-6 panels, and I didn’t think going beyond comedy would end well. You may also note that there’s a lot less dialogue than I normally cram into these things, because I don’t feel the world is missing much if I cover my own MS Paint backgrounds with speech bubbles. Not to mention, I was shooting for a picture-book effect, and that means leaving space for the actual pictures.

(This is starting to get a little pretentious isn’t it?)

Anyway, it’s a fragment of a dream come true, one small step for a man, one giant leap for Nick-kind, etcetera etcetera. Fortunately I have to go to the pub now, but I just wanted to enthuse a little. I suppose I should mention that, if you aspire artistically and enjoy Behatted and/or Scruff, and think you might be interested in working on some kind of a comic project, be it another short strip, a short story of a few pages or whatever, feel free to email me and we’ll see if I can think of anything. If there’s anything you particularly want to draw, I imagine I can make something up.

Right, the pub beckons. Despite the approaching annual death and return of the Lord, the Behatted schedule will march on. See you tomorrow for episode #6.

In the past few days, as we move into double figures, I’ve been trying to think of new and interesting ways to get people to look at the site. (Or “drive traffic to it”, as I might say were I a serious businessman, and were this a serious business instead of a silly website with some hats on it.) Unfortunately, I am not exactly a natural born self-promoter, and the webcomics field is more competitive than the open kennels at the start of mating season.

So, I’ve joined all the webcomic related websites I can find (most of them are now linked in the “Webcomic resources” category I’ve added on the right), spammed a lot of Facebook friends with “suggestions” that they should join the Behatted Facebook fan page (AND SO SHOULD YOU) and written an entry for Behatted on the “Comixpedia”. I did consider starting one for Wikipedia as well, but I hear that if you create a Wikipedia page about your own product, the web police come to your house with batons and pound your hands apart until you can no longer type anything that might offend them.

So, anyway, I need some ideas. A few more entries (Say twenty? Thirty?) and I might consider paying actual money for advertising on a website somewhere, but there must be some way of pulling together some grass roots action. Maybe I should start leaving hats in strange places all over the UK? Business cards? Posters? It’s a scary world out there, and I need to stand out somehow. I thought that the hat photos/MS Paint backgrounds combo would be enough to make people think “Okay, he’s pretty odd,” but perhaps not.

Ah, never mind. I’ll think of something. It’s just, at times like this, I wish I was more of an arrogant arsehole. And, people reading this, if you have any marvellous promotional ideas, or you run a website yourself and would like to cross-promote, feel free to comment below or email me or something. See you in about eight hours for episode #13!

Page sponsored by: Promotional resources – A great way to promote your company is with promotional products with your company logo on them.

Good afternoon.

Now that we appear to have launched the Behatted webcomic to a small but dedicated audience of about twenty to thirty people (tell your friends!), I thought I’d try and build something down here in the lesser-seen underside of the page, aside from lo-content promotional whiffle. So this is The Weekly Hat, a low-budget, somewhat anglo-centric blog-ramble-magazine (Can I coin the term “blogazine”? ….. No, apparently it’s already on Urban Dictionary, so I can’t…) about whatever the hell has been going on, filtered through whatever lens is required to make it interesting to me, and by extension, to you. (Or so I hope to God…)

In our first thrilling issue…

• Main feature: The collapse of the British government… Is there any real alternative?
• Our Fictional Guest Columnist is Swine Flu, meditating on the fleeting nature of modern celebrity.
• I care even if you don’t! New Brendan Benson album!
• Media And Stuff: New series of House! New Batman! I couldn’t afford to go the cinema this week!
• Behatted Photo Of The Week:  The most self-explanatory regular feature name since “Have the glaciers melted yet?”, written by a car exhaust pipe.
• Next week: Usually with topical writing, it’s hard to predict what’ll be in the next issue, but we laugh in the face of conventional “wisdom”.

(more…)