The Museum

Up first, an effort from April 12, 2002. I was still teaching myself Illustrator when I drew this one, and obviously hadn't gotten the hang of it yet. Plus, I was drawing with the mouse. Random trivia, I apparently drew this on Di's birthday. Note that Lissa still has her collitch haircut. Also, that the comic sucks.

May 12, 2002. Ever so slightly better. I'm not ruling out the possibility that I actually drew this with my laptop's touchpad. At least I didn't frame it so that Jen has her back to the audience—a good thing, since I have a habit of not really drawing noses. The white blocks to each side mean that somebody hadn't figured out clipping masks yet. I like that I had Ron get his ass totally kicked in darts, in the background. Also, in between these two strips, Lissa gets more or less totally recast as high-falutin'. You can tell this because she is drinking a martini and not beer. Basically, her haircut as it used to be was a tremendous pain in the ass in Illustrator, and the new one made her look a bit glamorous, so I decided to go with the image overhaul. The downside of this is that, because she's now the success of the group, her lines often come across as being tremendously bitchy, and I have to concentrate to make her not completely unlikeable.

December 29, 2002. God, I think this one's actually worse. I discovered Scary-go-round, which cannot be praised highly enough, immediately before Christmas in '02, and must've felt inspired to try his style. As you can see, I sucked at it. I'm not sure why I gave Jen glasses, but I kind of like them.

June 5, 2003. For a while, I thought of the Lilypad (as I was still calling it in my head) as kind of a free-form graphic novel, do an 8.5 x 11 page each installment and let the jokes fall where they may. That attitude didn't last too long. Among the major leaps here is that this is the first strip I did with my Wacom tablet, paid for by this strange freelance project I did for Barnard's Class of '63 that I think may actually make the strip someday. Also, Jen and Ron both become a little more dissheveled, although Jen is sporting a tie. I think she'll still pull that at some point, but here it makes her a little too tomboyish.

That more or less concludes this totally unnecessary trip through Five Bucks' prehistory. I just thought it might be fun to show you guys this crap, along with the various iterations of how I draw my Beck t-shirt.